Gracie Korstjens

Biography

Gracie Korstjens is an interdisciplinary printmaker practicing in Boston, MA, where they currently attend the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. They have participated in a number of printmaking workshops at Frogman’s Print Workshop, and exhibited in a number of group exhibitions.

Artist Statement

Through interdisciplinary printmaking techniques, my practice interrogates the Western impulse to capture, categorize, and exhaustively “know” the natural world. Rooted in a critique of Enlightenment frameworks, such as the rigid hierarchies of Linnaean taxonomy, which sought to freeze and isolate complex ecologies into possessable objects, my work seeks an alternative ontological understanding. The Western will to knowledge often functions as a mechanism of capture, relying on the analytical division of the world into subject and object. Instead of wielding knowledge as a tool for reduction, my work is an attempt to cultivate a space of co-presence, a visual language that respects the irreducibility of things.

I recently took to lichen as a biological and conceptual anchor for this resistance to classification. As a holobiont, a composite of fungus, algae, and other miscellaneous collaborators, lichen refuses the singular, bounding logic of traditional taxonomy. It operates as a living embodiment of Russell’s Paradox, a category that cannot contain itself. It defies the Aristotelian “ladder of being”, occupying a gray space that provides our rigid taxonomies (much like Jorge Kuis Borges’s absurd fictional encyclopedias) are entirely insufficient to hold the messy, interdependent truths of being. In my work, lichen is not a subject to be inspected, but a collaborator in a directionless being-with, reminding us of our own porosity.

Through the rigorous, physical craft of printmaking, I engage with the ontological surplus of objects. A printing matrix becomes a scientific instrument, filtering the excess of a subject into a manageable data point. The real subject always withdraws from our grasp. The physical matrix and the resulting print never truly touch in their essence; they interact solely on a sensual plane. The ink transferred to the paper is an indexical trace, an impression of a withdrawn reality. Ultimately, my prints are not attempts to conquer the unknown or catalog the biosphere. They are records of a negotiated existence. By embracing the literal and metaphorical distortions inherent in the print process, I invite viewers to abandon the desire for mastery. Our tools and classifications do not provide a transparent portrait of reality, but instead trace the outline of a withdrawal, reminding us that the world is always deeper, stranger, and more resilient than our categories allow.