Pia Östlund: A Sense of Curiosity for Rediscovery
This month’s conversation is with Pia Östlund, an artist, designer and printmaker, who I had the pleasure of interviewing in person at her exhibition, Sea of Love at the NoShowSpace gallery in London.
Pia is Swedish, but has lived in London for the past twenty-five years. She studied graphic design and printmaking at Central St. Martins, and after graduating she worked for Chelsea Physic Garden for fourteen years. This gave Pia access to its private reference library of books from the 1500s and onwards, including leather bound books illustrated with wood cuts and engravings. She came across a book detailing a method of printmaking and decided to revive this lost art. This was ten years ago and she is still very much in the process of it!
Simon Prett captured her quest to revive the process in The Nature-printer: A tale of ferns, industrial espionage and roofing lead (TimPress 2012). Her work is featured in Phaidon’s, and she is the co-author of Capturing Nature (Zucker Art Books 2022 & Princeton Architectural Press 2023) together with Matthew Zucker. Pia was the 2023 recipient of the Queen Elizabeth Scholarship and has presented her work at Oxford Botanic Gardens, Archive of Modern Conflict, Bodleian Libraries, and the University of Oxford; and has presented talks and workshops at The Linnean Society of London, Royal Horticultural Society, Cambridge University Botanic Gardens, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, and more.
After viewing her beautiful exhibition Sea of Love, I was fascinated to learn more about how Pia discovered this old printing art form and how she is developing it into her creative practice today. As well as sharing how this unique process works, Pia also explains why a sense of curiosity is key to her work...
Where do you work? What makes this place important for your creative process?
I’ve just re-joined a printmaking space called East London Printmakers, but I’m also still working at home. All the textile printing I do is in a rented space in South London, and the textile pieces for this current exhibition were done in Copenhagen. Because I use a lot of different processes, I work in many different places. It’s too expensive to have one studio in one place, so when I’m working on a particular project, I’ll find a space that works for it. I’m setting up the whole printing process at home now and this will give me a continuous amount of time to play with it and experiment.
The work for Sea of Love developed during residencies at Tjärnö Marine Laboratory in Sweden and at Borch Editions in Copenhagen. Tjärnö was an interesting place. There was a constant sound of running water and so many tanks everywhere containing all sorts of specimens from the sea. If you want to store seaweed that you’ve just collected, you put them in an available tank and label it with a number tag. Seawater on tap will keep them alive. I found that there were quite a lot of similarities between the scientists who work there and myself as an artist, finding our own ways to explore different subjects.
"I want to invite people to look at my work, but they don’t have to look at it in the way I do. I want them to find something new and take it in their own direction."
How would you describe your creative process? Do you use certain mediums/techniques to develop your creative ideas?
The printmaking technique that I’m reviving was invented in Vienna in the 1850s and was a contemporary with Freud and the beginning of psychoanalysis. There was a notion that we can’t trust ourselves or what we see; we put our own perspective onto things, even if we try to be objective, we never are. The traditional way of making images of plants was through a botanist instructing an artist and agreeing on how the image should look, but this is very subjective. So when it was discovered that you could take a highly detailed impression of a plant in lead, this allowed for the plant to render its own image. However, you can’t print from lead as it will start to stretch or leave other marks. At the time, the battery had just been invented and gradually a process developed whereby you could set up two objects in an electrolyte bath and put a charge between them; loose particles of metal would get attracted to the surface of the object with the negative charge and form a thin shell. In simplified terms, if you leave the charge running for longer, then gradually a metal shell thick enough forms that can be peeled off, polished and used as a printing plate. It's a weird process but like a kind of strange magic!
Do you have any rituals that help with this process of creating work?
I would say music, with my record player, and coffee! I feel like they recalibrate the mind-set. More specifically to my current exhibition, Fran Lockyer, who I collaborated with for the textile pieces, used to live close to me. There is a park nearby with a round circle in the centre, and we would often say, “Okay, I’ll meet you in the centre,” before going to the studio in South London. We would always meet there to walk to the station together, which became a ritual for us.
I often find it quite hard to start work because of other distractions, such as if it’s untidy at home, or I need to reply to someone, so I have quite a slow start-up process. Before I begin a new project, I need to sort out my space and clear the office, which I find really difficult to stop once I’ve started!
Also, lying on the floor is good to just disconnect. If your head feels full of too much information, simply lying on the ground helps to recalibrate.
What are you working on at the moment?
The next big thing is to set up my own electroforming tank in my studio so that I can have full autonomy over the process and start to play with it. I want to find a way of working with the nature printing process that isn’t tied down in the technicalities, but rather experiment with making it freer and looser, with potential collaborations. I think this will follow from becoming more at ease with the technical aspects and trying new things.
I am also interested in printing on textiles. Nature prints reproduced in their actual size on paper work especially well in books, as they are an intimate experience with all their intricate detail. I have started experimenting with enlarging the nature prints and screen printing them onto textiles. I love how printing on fabric can facilitate the transition of a flat image into a three-dimensional spatial object which in turn can be used to create an environment or a setting.
Alongside this, the Sea of Love exhibition will transition to Tjärnö Marine Laboratory next.
Another exhibition, Capturing Nature based on a book Matthew Zucker and I co-authored, was showing in Singapore at the Botanic Garden there earlier this year and might go to the States next.
What does “sense of place” mean to you? Is this concept present in your work?
A friend of mine, who is a psychoanalyst, introduced me to Winnicott’s concept of ‘potential space,’ which I think for me is a space where something can happen. You see a picture, or you see something or a process in the space, creating potential. With this exhibition, Sea of Love, I feel in some ways that it’s about sense of place rather than the individual prints. Maybe someone will look at a print whilst also hearing a sound or listening to a song and connect to a particular place.
When I was at the Marine Laboratory, the first thing I felt I had to do was to go swimming in the sea! You don’t want to just look at a place, you want to do something in it. There is something about certain places which make you feel that you can think or create something in them, for example at the Chelsea Physic Garden, there are also layers of history that add to this essence of place.
I grew up near the sea and so often feel a sense of place when I’m at the coast. Whenever I’m inland, I always want to migrate back towards the edges. Another friend, who is also a psychoanalyst, talks about the seashore as a place where the conscious and the subconscious meet, which also appeals to me as an idea and way of thinking about a place.
"If you have an interest and passion for something, it can develop into a positive contribution for the world around you. We don’t need to create more anxiety in the world, we should focus on creating something positive."
Do you have a message that you hope to give to the world through your work?
I have a sense of curiosity and wanting to find things out. I want to invite people to look at my work, but they don’t have to look at it in the way I do. I want them to find something new and take it in their own direction. It’s not prescriptive.
My work is also about the environment and climate change. If you start to notice the world around you, you see things, and this is the first step towards caring about it. If you have an interest and passion for something, it can develop into a positive contribution for the world around you. It doesn’t rely on materialistic objects or physical stuff and throwing things away. We don’t need to create more anxiety in the world, we should focus on creating something positive.
Pia's Book List:
I’ve always loved books, and when thinking about place, libraries and books create a space in your mind, an imaginary space.
1. Scrap by Calla Henkel
I came across this book through the Cabinet Gallery in Vauxhall.
2. Reverie, its Practice and Means of Display by the late Marc Camille Chaimowicz
This is another book I’m currently reading found through the Cabinet Gallery.
3. The Hound of the Baskervilles by Conan Doyle
I re-read this book most summers. It is just such a brilliantly told story.
To learn more about Pia's work, visit her website at www.ostlundindustries.com and Instagram @piaostlund_natureprinting
The NoShowSpace can be found here at www.noshowspace.com
Images 1, 2, 4, 5: Ostlund Industries
Image 3: No Show Space
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