Salted Snail Studio

Salted Snail Studio is Jasper Alexander, a queer printmaker working out of a home studio in Austin, Texas. Previously a hair stylist, Jasper picked up relief printmaking on a whim after his salon closed down due to the Covid-19 pandemic. He has been at it ever since, devoting most days to printmaking or thinking about printmaking.

“There’s something really satisfying to me about subtractive mediums,” he claims. “When I’m painting, it’s very easy for me to overwork a piece. With linoleum, there’s only so much you actually can do – there’s a finite amount of material to chip away at, no matter how ambitious you may be feeling. The piece tells you when it’s done. I like creating with those kinds of limitations.”

Jasper carves almost exclusively on unmounted linoleum at a small scale in a spare-bedroom-made-art-studio using a hand lever press. He breaks out a tiny rose quartz baren for hand burnishing trickier prints that require a bit more attention.

Most of his recent work attempts to highlight ecological processes as therapeutic reminders. “I find the difference between how I experience time and how a worm or a giant redwood or a mushroom or a rock or a canyon experiences time absolutely fascinating,” says Jasper. “I’ve taken a lot of comfort in exploring and, frankly, anthropomorphizing how all sorts of creatures experience existence. I think that shows up a lot in my work. I extrapolate lessons for myself from looking at molding stumps or watching lizards do pushups on my porch… then I make art about it.”

Jasper also enjoys carving tiny prints of mundane household objects (like pencils, candles and teapots) and stitching them into small banners utilising recycled textiles and found notions. He states; “When you attempt to render a simple object, it takes on more of an identity and symbology than the actual object you’re attempting to represent. It’s like writing a love letter to a thing. My life and home and studio are crammed full of things – I’m an absolute sucker for a knickknack… So I try to counter my own inherent consumerism with these tokens of sincere appreciation for the objects I interact with regularly. I don’t like to think of the magical and the mundane as separate – any item can become sacred through both intentional use and regular appreciation. I don’t ever want to lose sight of the importance of little things. The ritual of slow work like stitching and linocut really help me stay in touch with that. ”

www.saltedsnailstudio.com
@saltedsnailstudio