Annalise Gratovich began drawing this series thirteen years ago. The impetus, she says, was her father and his parents' flight from Ukraine. He was a very young child during World War II, and the family left in the middle of the night with what they could carry, traveling through Eastern Europe before the Tolstoy Foundation sponsored their passage to the United States. Almost all the familial ties on that side were lost. What remains is a handful of photographs, some of them portraits from Red Cross ration cards.
"That loss of familial and personal and cultural identity has left a lot of space for what I kind of refer to as a mythology of these questions and inferences and bits of stories," Gratovich says. Carrying Things From Home, on view at Hecho a Mano June 5–28, is the result: a cycle of eight life-sized woodcuts, totemic beings she thinks of less as figures than as vessels, each carrying something precious that alludes to its personhood. Their forms are loosely based on the stacking matryoshka doll, a shape she played with as a kid and came to embrace only later in the work.
The eight are elemental. The Mariner came first, holding a big fish that also reads as a whale, standing for exploration and migration. Then the Hunter, a Siberian figure with a hare and a bear, for food. The Builder is shelter, the Musician is the arts, and a pairing of figures holds life and death. The Healer, the most metaphysical of the cycle, came out of Gratovich's recovery after a serious illness. It was the first piece she completed coming back to her studio. Its central image is a swirling black-and-white vortex from the solar plexus, surrounded by composting wood and mushrooms, shedding serpents, alternating seasons, a spider web rebuilt every day. "That piece, like I say, it saved me, and we maybe kind of created each other," she says.
The Fool closes the series, and is the most esoteric of the eight. Gratovich always wanted to end there. "I think I was setting myself up for the idea of new beginnings," she says. The figure carries a star portal that doubles in its eyes, gazes into a swampy expanse with palmettos and fireflies mid-flight, and wears a headdress steeped in Slavic Tree of Life symbolism: stags, an oak, acorns, foxes after berries. The seedling that appears throughout the cycle returns here inside a flame, blooming, with two moths drawn toward it. "Play and joy is really important," she says of the small details, "it's hard work, but it's not just hard work."
The making is famously labor-intensive. Each woodcut takes months to carve, then is colored with hand-dyed papers in a process that can run more than a month, printed by hand at Flatbed Press in Austin with a team of three to four other printers. The last two figures, The Healer and The Fool, carry sixty and seventy pieces of dyed paper apiece. Gratovich describes the work as a dialogue. "The piece was saying that's not the right thing for me to wear," she says, recalling a headdress design she scrapped and rebuilt. "That's not me, so I was like, okay, let me go back and dress the new things and see what fits right."
Now that the cycle is complete, she feels relief more than mourning, and it all rolls into the next thing. She's eyeing more large multi-plate etchings in the vein of Ultra Horizon, and a relief series at a smaller, cradled scale. "I tell myself there are no rules," she says. "If I want to come back to this project and do something else, I'll do it. There's another eight."