Carte blanche to Audrée Wilhelmy | The transmission belt

With their unique pen and their own sensitivity, artists present to us, in turn, their vision of the world around us. This week, we are giving carte blanche to Audrée Wilhelmy.

My house is home to cast iron beasts, funny mechanical animals that my shoulder, my arm make sing. I activate the handles and generate the circular movement of the cogs, the press bed rolls on its bearings while texts and images are printed.

The time that has stopped during the pandemic has allowed me to follow an ongoing training in craft printing. It all started with my editor and friend, Pierre Filion, who conducts experimental projects in his Atelier du Silence. He practices there an unusual form of book art, that of the letter-by-letter composition of texts, with brass dies and lead and wood characters.

The Atelier du Silence is full of treasures. One of the most precious: the Meuble à Giguère. In its large drawers, thousands of wooden letters used by the poet and artist Roland Giguère to create, among other things, his poem-posters from the 1960s to the 1990s. There is also a printing press that belonged to Margaret Atwood, a etching press used for Antoine Pentsch’s engravings, hundreds of drawers of characters, a cast iron cutter, a machine for melting lines of lead: archaic objects transmitted from craftsman to craftsman, outside commercial networks, collected and maintained for four decades.

In the Presses du Bûcher workshop, which I am in the process of setting up, other objects have traced the course of history to the point of being deposited between the walls of my house. First, the Livernoise, a jewel of a press more than a century old that belonged to the artist Paul Livernois, himself a descendant of the Livernois photographers of Quebec, who used other presses for their photographic work. Then, Pierre’s first printing press, partially electric, which he generously offered to me seeing that my interest was undeniable. Soon, a third press will come to join them, with etching, this one, and having belonged to Albert Rousseau before traveling from workshop to workshop. The artist Madeleine Samson will send it to me in turn at the end of May.

With these objects travels a whole knowledge. Craft printing, relief engraving, etching, stationery (which I’m also learning) and bookbinding (which I’ll look into next year) are all arts of gesture and repetition. .

Few are those who still master the choreography that leads from ideas to hand-printed books. And above all, they have no successors.

For the past two years, I have surrounded myself with mentors who will eventually lose the strength and mobility that their creation requires. Pierre, Denise, Paul, Madeleine: they have passed retirement age, continue their work, some out of passion, others, for lack of a qualified successor. I try to learn from them everything there is to remember, the knowledge that they have taken a lifetime to accumulate. But the gestures of an art take time to master, and even if I try to acquire several at the same time, I will not be able to be the sole guardian of all this memory.

The problem of transmission is substantial, and not only in the arts. The knowledge that forged the pre-digital world is on the verge of extinction. With them, entire swaths of culture disappear, rich in gestures, in a vocabulary (who today knows tarlatan, burnishers, printing nappies, mezzotint, the eye of letter, the eardrum, the composter?) and an art of living without urgency, in the simple precision of the gestures of the hand and the body.

The knowledge that my mentors carry was already archaic when they learned it from their masters. In the 1970s, the return to the land was coupled, in cities and manufacturing sectors, with a curiosity for modes of creation independent of electricity. A handful of curious people allowed traditional trades to survive for a few decades. The generations that followed, however, lost interest in these tedious and slow practices, exalted by the speed of digital tools.

Now time is running out, in all areas, before all the knowledge from living heritage is resolutely lost.

Fortunately, some organizations are struggling to keep track of this knowledge, and small groups are being created, specializing again, particularly over the past ten years. I am thinking, for example, of the Retailles team, which is exploring stationery, or that of Habi Habi, which is rediscovering natural dyes.

In the Presses du Bûcher workshop, I try to follow the same approach – a mixture of archival and creative work. My dog ​​sleeps at the foot of the presses, the smells of ink with natural pigmentation mingle with those of solvents. My gestures lack flexibility, my body dances a choreography that I have not yet fully mastered, where physical strength, awkwardness and precision overlap. Their convergence results in the printed image. I am 36 years old and I am already thinking of the day when it will be my turn to transmit the steps of this waltz, the objects of which I am only guardian, for the duration of a lifetime. Will there be someone to take them back? Someone who will know that the wealth of the world is not only in the future, but also in the past?

* Audrée Wilhelmy founded the Presses du Bûcher in 2021, dedicated to artisanal printing and artist’s books