Annalise Gratovich creates her finely crafted prints by hand from start to finish, carving wood, etching metal, dyeing paper, and using manual printing presses to create multiple originals. Each piece is printed on the finest archival papers using oil based inks and hand dyed papers she produces in her studio. Annalise operates as a self publisher out of Austin, Texas and travels frequently across the country as a visiting artist and speaker and to publish prints with esteemed print shops.
"I'd already decided to switch that figure to a healer long before my autoimmune disease expressed itself, so it just happened to be the one that was next in line when I was able to go back to my studio. I don't think that's a coincidence. That piece is extremely powerful to me, because it saved me, and we maybe kind of created each other. I can't look at it and not feel grateful."
He went to California College of the Arts at eighteen, took metals every semester, worked as a bench jeweler on the side, and then went to UW Madison for grad school. There he started researching the trophy as a cultural object, tracing how it moved "from altruism to competition" to the participatory plastic trophies of contemporary childhood. While making trophies out of found tableware in junk shops, he picked up a silver-plated platter and never really put it down.
The choice has stuck partly for ecological reasons. "Fifteen years in, I can still buy a silver-plated platter for cheaper than a sheet of metal," he said. The thrift stores are full of them, mass-produced objects pretending to be more valuable than they are, brass or copper under a thin layer of silver, carrying the marks of however much their owners cared.
When asked about his early resistance to the word "nostalgia," he traced it back to grad school, when the term carried a dirtier charge in the art world. But he's come around to a more layered version of it. "Sometimes I talk to people about being nostalgic for the current moment," he said. "When you're so enjoying something and already knowing that it might pass, that's a type of nostalgia too."
The conversation also looped through Shakespeare on tragedy versus comedy (the comic characters are the ones who figure out what's going on by the end), David Chang on building more failure into a creative practice, and Jaydan's growing pull toward car fabrication and low-rider culture as the next material to explore. Underneath all of it ran the same question his work has always asked: what gets carried forward when an object outlives the person who loved it.
Near the end, riffing on his own trophy research, he landed on a line that worked as a kind of summary. "We're all just figuring it out. We're all still clawing into the dark."