Based in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, printmaker and sculptor Yonina Rollack pays tribute to the earth and its inhabitants, creating playful images that are both drawn from reality and an extension of her own inner world. Shaped by a background in printmaking and countless hours spent looking through library books, Yonina’s work is illustrative, personalizing observations of the world through her own aesthetic.
In Yonina’s Arctic Wildlife series, she uses the negative space of the white page surrounding the image to convey a feeling of vast, snowy surroundings. Forms are reduced to simplified shapes due to the nature of the collagraph printing process, in which found materials are glued to an aluminum plate and wiped with ink to create textural impressions on the resulting printed paper. The paper is soaked in water before printing and then is left under a heavy weight to reduce – but never completely eliminate – wrinkling. Because of the distinctive nature of this process, no two original prints are the same.
You can read more about Yonina Rollack here.