Palak Patel Interviews & Collaborates with Magazine TM
Continue reading below for the full video, podcast, transcript, reference text and images.
Magazine TM Interview with Palak Patel
July 9, 2025
*Text reference (See links at the bottom of this webpage)
**Image reference (See gallery at the bottom of this webpage)
My name is Palak and I'm from India. I moved to Chicago in 2021 after finishing my undergrad at MS University in Baroda. I majored in painting, and all my life, I've just been painting and drawing and then I came across printmaking and undergrad, we started with woodcut and then lithography and then we did more etching, until COVID. I just spent three years there. I had a four-year program, but it was cut short due to COVID and it was then I decided that it would be nice to do a program that's in between undergrad and masters and SAIC offered the post-bac degree, which is just a one-year program. And I moved here for that. It was just so nice to have access to so many departments. I could draw from my experience as a painter and as someone who just liked journaling and reading and build a language with that using printmaking. Then I continued to do a two-year grad program here at SAIC as well in the same department.
I didn't even know that I'd been accepted until it was as casually mentioned in a Zoom meeting and I was like, oh, wow. So, oh, I can continue to do this.
[Palak makes a 2 minute pencil drawing on newsprint]
You can follow any line that you want. Yeah, I don't know. I'm excited to see how it shows up because I haven't really worked with woodblock in a long time because my work, it's transfers through a screen or even through etching. So. I mean. Yeah, it's been a while. Yeah, I did it in India, but I also did some of it during my post-bac because I didn't know the facilities there that well. So I just started with woodblock because it was easier to interpret without exactly knowing - that was the only press that I knew the specifications for and it was so open ended and intuitive even working with lots of different pressures and with layers and it was more abstract.
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So the author of the article* was also a grad student and some art program and Ana Mendieta was one of the faculty she had on her PhD panels. So that was a note that Ana sent to this author and she was like, I don't have much to say, but just this note. I was in my second year of grad school as well and the suggestion was given to me by this visiting artist, Ruby T. and they were in my studio and there was a time when my work had so much materiality, across so many mediums that I was going from wax to objects to paper and fabric and just going back and forth between all of them, that created so much dynamic meaning for me. It came alive because of that. I felt more when I was molding the wax or in the actions that happened during printing, especially when, you know, when you pull an image out and then you have to go wash the screen and all the ink that you collect after you make a screen print and you collect them in jars and it drips along edges and it's so goopy all the time and it's such a wet process as well. And that created such dynamic results and they were so mixed and unpredictable and the action that became part of the routine got interwoven with my drive and it kept me going. It was so much drama and I loved the theater of it. So I guess just juggling between what that materiality and action meant for me in my discussion with the visiting artist and it just made me want to think more about the substrate maybe because it was more about how it felt for me and the way the work was presented or placed in my studio or just the action of the image just going back and forth between all these different substrates, backs and paper and fabric that may have led to the question. Yeah. And you also asked for, what I could do more with, that may have been evoked. Recently I was writing and then I happen to not like it because it was being it was just having a very self-critical tone that I didn't need in the moment and I just aggressively scratched out - it was just a sentence - and I scratched it out and I feel I could bring more of that aggression or that self protectiveness in my work, more force and because, yeah, I have been feeling so much in movement in general, moving makes, has more meaning for me these days. Especially after leaving grad school. I feel more in the moments when I'm outside or in my boxing gym and also in reading, but more so it all makes sense when I happen to move even in my own apartment.
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Yeah, I just started to write more when I was in my third year of my undergrad. It was a very self-directed program. We didn't have much faculty interventions and how we worked. So it was more of coming out from just doing still life lessons, to making more of your own work. And writing - it was more of a journaling and that did help me a lot, to question what I was doing. And it was more sporadic, at that moment, but it's more regular now after I moved to the city. It's become more regular. Yeah. It ebbs and flows, but it's a lot of journaling. And for the show, I was just transcribing what I had written in my journal and typing it to the laptop and just extracting different instances, from the moment after I graduated and what had led to the making of the show. While I was at Farewell, it's a residency in Frederick, Illinois the last two weeks. I was confronted more with what I was feeling. I got to know more in terms of where it's me as a person who desires and who's been yearning for so long, for different things. And that led to different tangents and combined with the forms of descriptions I had for daily life, but also inner, my innermost feelings or thoughts, that led to the creation of some kind of fiction as well. That I could work with potentially and I was also reading Wittgenstein* alongside. And then it's helping me be more intentional with my language. So I feel it's an interesting point at the moment now. On language. I'm not the best person to talk about his writing but his main essay, the nature of philosophy, it's based on the premise that a lot of problems that are created for us are due to, created in philosophy, specifically, are because of language. I mean, the knots in language and philosophy should be about undoing those knots in language. And a lot of different things come in. One thing is grammar, but also other realizations of sorts.
I didn't take a class. Not formally. That was a class, art and language back in grad school, but yeah, I mean, not so intensely, I guess, I'm not that articulate when it comes to talking about philosophy. It has helped in so many different moments. As I said before, the problems in language or in expression, so much of it could be found and encountering certain philosophies, I guess. Yeah, no, I was just thinking about the time Jasper and I were talking about Derrida* and the idea of the Parergon and the frame. Like the work of art doesn't always need a frame to define itself. It’s from long ago. My views might change, might have changed on that particular idea, but it's not coming to me right now… I haven't used one yet. Not even a stretcher for any of my fabric works. I tried it, but it didn't make sense in that moment.
Usually when I start off, if I'm reading something that might especially prompt me to write. But I also write after I come back from my boxing classes. It's another realization. So much of what I think is also so important to me, that becomes clear when I'm writing about it. And that carries so much weight and meaning as well. I write at the start of the day or after boxing lessons or just when I'm feeling so strongly about something that's maybe stopping me from proceeding. My writing style sometimes has conflict between my inner voice and outer voice. Maybe it’s (descriptive writing) just not something I'm inclined towards. I don't have that. I was so weak even when in school, trying to structure a paper or an essay. So that it's articulate enough to serve as, you know, a submission of sort. But maybe it's just a different form that I work with and I've just been discovering it and different things I'm reading.
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I have classified it in two parts, I guess. One is my favorite technique. And the other could be just thinking about a piece, I made while at Poor Farm with my friend. It was just this silly little zine about cows who lived right across Poor Farm. You might have seen. It's so cute. Yeah. Because you would have seen how they start at one point, in the morning they would be at one end of the field and move towards the other end of the field as they fed from this corner to that it was just fun to see that and they would just go to sleep at night. My friend and I made a zine** about it, about how the cows hid under a grove of trees during the rain and when the rain stopped, they just came out and they were happy. So we made a small zine about that. It really might be because it was just fun to make. Yeah and in a non-pressured environment.
Someone in school had suggested to me a form of monotype making using the screen. And you would just flood the screen entirely and place it over the substrate and then you would apply pressure whatever you wanted the ink to touch the surface. So you would just draw along the screen, just apply pressure wherever you wanted the drawing to be formed and that area would mostly be printed onto the substrate. That’s how I went from making monotypes directly on paper, onto the fabric. You could just combine so many mediums and create monotypes. It's fun.
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It's at home right now. We thought of sending it out to Mark, but we haven't done it yet. It's about the cows. They're just eating, they're grazing. It starts raining and then they disappear and they hide under the trees and then the rain starts. The sun comes out and they're happy. It was also my friend and I, we were also practicing talking in French with each other at the moment. So the zine is also in French, the text and the zine is in French just because we were practicing. Yeah, I guess I haven't practiced French in a long time, so I can't recount. We would just say “les vaches revennent”, they returned. The rain stops. “Le soleil” and “il pleaut”, it's raining and yeah, it was just a weird thing. Yeah, we had a lot of paper. And you know that very simple format of just folding the page in eight parts to form this formal zine. If we take a print, we could also try making it here. It could be fun. It was silly, but it was a fun thing to do after a long time, after all the grad shows and graduating.
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But I really had fun with the risograph as well. That was what I thought when you said, “favorite”. It's what I miss right now. I would print and I would layer each print in different colors and I would just continue to saturate the print and then I would have it cut in different shapes to form a book. I showed some of them in my grad show as well.
Oh yeah it’s the risograph I just talked about**. Yeah, I just mentioned it, the drawing is from, a drawing of just different boxing gloves on a piece of plywood that I was planning to cut into shapes and I scanned that piece of plywood and then I printed images of those in the risograph. And continue to saturate so you would see how the lines stacking on top of each other. And I was at that time I was working with the ideas of accumulating and repeating the same motion and I wanted to solidify that motion in a piece of in a piece of work, in this moment, it's kind of, I did it while making, it's kind of a book, I would say, but it's also just a form that I wanted to create using these prints. That was really great. It's something, an idea that I had been thinking of in different ways. And I try to do some of it at Farewell House as well.
Yeah, it's a risograph print and mostly on these 11 by 17 sheets. So I have had them in two colors. One is a warm white and the other is a cool white. So even that creates a variation with all these colors that I was printing with. And yeah, I would also change the position of the image a few times while printing. So, it would also appear shaky and I would also send you an image** of all the original prints I had because I saw it after a long time and I was, wow, I really made this and then I cut it up. I couldn't keep those prints by themselves. I had to cut them up for some strange reason.
Yeah, it's also the grain texture, maybe, of the wood that comes out here, some of it, at least, but it's also in the risograph prints and dots. It's kind of a screen print done through the machine. You can find similar texture as you would in a screen print that's done in bitmap, you know.
I just call it different names each time because I couldn't find a fitting title for it. It was riso book at one point and then it was just gloves. Oh, yeah. Those were the ones on the wall. It’s RV. It's just short for roundhouse variations because I was making prints about making a roundhouse, how the feet move while doing a roundhouse kick. That was done using monotypes and it really helped trying to find the perfect moment. The piece was also about trying to find that moment but also how you can have the image form that movement. Your body does it, but how do you perform it while making an image? That work alongside kickboxing and the printing.
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Oh my God. I feel the ones that endure the most are from Formula One. Yeah. “Oh, it must be the water.” or “just an inchident”. Ferrari. It's all Ferrari. Poor Ferrari, but yeah, there are just a lot of memes. Yeah, I feel like I started Formula One just because of the memes. But also there's a recent one from a chess tournament in India. You know, Magnus Carlsen. He lost to this player called Gukesh who's from India. Yeah. I saw that. Have you seen that? Haha. Yeah, he gets up and he’s losing and he bangs the table and Gukesh it like “oh my God”. And he walks up, just pats him on the back and he’s still in shock.
Even Pride and Prejudice resonates so much. From the book but especially from the movie. I don’t know if you know the characters but especially, you know, Charlotte. There's this character Charlotte who's turning 27 and she is engaged with this man whom her best friend had rejected just a few moments ago and she and she's telling them, “oh, don't judge me. I'm 27. I have no money, no prospects. And I'm already a burden to my parents.” And I feel I want that on my birthday cake next year when I'll be 27. That’ll be so apt.
[Palak continues to carve the woodblock] It’s going. It’s very lovely. Yeah, it's smoother than I thought.
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Yeah, there is an artist called Nasreen Mohamedi. She is not alive, unfortunately, she passed away, she was quite young and in the middle of her career and was making amazing work. I mostly was drawn to her because of just the writing around her or just, as I got to know about her, I wanted to know more about her. Yeah, one of the early modern artists in India. She wasn't a part of the movement specifically, but she was among this group of people who I guess were early, not early, just modern abstractionists in India. She was one of the people in India who started to move away from representational art. Her work is kind of the opposite of what our reading of Ana Mendieta's work is from that essay, which was more emotional. Nasreen’s is more “rational”. She did look to the constructivists quite a little bit. But it was very logical. It was almost like looking to nature, to draw your own logic, not replicating nature, but constructing your own logic through it. There’s a lot of emphasis on one's spiritual life and doing things in your life, in your routine that leads to the creation of your practice or how the routine is also a part of your practice. She’s known for having just black and white colors in her room, but not like an aesthetic, but it was just about the presence in her room that she wanted, more quiet. She would clean each day and she would have her floor extremely clean. She'd have her surroundings extremely clean. And it was a lot for her about clearing the mind and cleaning the slate to start daily and purging any emotions. But her body would show through her work as well, even if her work wasn't considered emotional. It was quiet, it was rational, it was delicate, but it was very sophisticated and her life showed through her work in that way.
Mostly from books and the library. And she was also talked about in Baroda. She was a professor where I went to undergrad, so yeah, that place has had a lot of major Indian artists. Her work also had a retrospective a few years ago at this gallery in my hometown. And I got to see it live there for the first time and that was amazing. I took so many photographs and I should have bought the, what's that? The exhibition catalog* from there and my phone got stolen a year later, so all those pictures, they disappeared. But. Yeah. What she did was just, beyond language. It had these formal elements, you could make me lines, you could name textures, you could name colors, how the lines would form shapes of their own. And but you would have to see it in order to know personally. There's this essay that I still go through from time to time that was written about her by Geeta Kapur* and some of her journals were also published in one of her exhibition catalogues. I could send those to you, but you know those made so much sense in getting to know her. So I feel reading her journals* or like reading this essay and looking at her work, her earlier work and just getting to know her practice from long ago to what it got to a time when she had this neurological disease that her body couldn't control itself, but she made her hands, but she had this determination that she wanted to continue making and she would continue to draw even in pain. Yeah, there’s a correlation with her work with what Barthes, Roland Barthes talks about language as well, your body exceeds the language, even if you're silent, your body would express it. Even if you are in pain or in love or anything. So that was very much what she did.
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Yeah, it started with me being preoccupied with a range of motion that was just limited to kickboxing at that time. I was trying to think more about, “oh, how is this kick performed? And, I should draw this figure to understand how that kick is happening. And I just had a range of prints or monotypes just centering around this one move or different sets of moves. And then it became, as it happened more and more on material, it was this moment. It's getting solidified on this material. That's also being repeated. And how it's just having this sculptural quality and it's multiplicity and that was very profound for me. It’s really transcending the image for me, in the way it was getting more sculptural but also, it was one of the reasons I was reminded why I wanted to do more print media work instead of just painting because I was at a standstill in my painting practice because I couldn't see an image to its end. Like that image it just couldn't handle having it in a painting. It had to move through a range of processes for me to continue. And that happened in printmaking and some of it in writing as well. I realized as it happens over time. And now, I'm doing more of different exercises or relating to different motions or parts of my body, even through lifting or just as I learned more and more about how my body can move, and, even mastering that movement, it's a learning curve, makes me think about a lot of things even the people who teach me or people that interact with. So it's getting more into the environment I'm interacting with at this gym or at wherever, whichever location I'm at. So there is an expansion beyond that or even a wholeness that's being formed in the range of motion that's surpassing, just doing boxing.
It’s good. I’m carving out my name.
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There's this essay* that was delivered by this author on MidAmerica Print Council a decade ago or two decades ago. It's been a long time. It's just more about how there hasn't been so much writing about printmaking than there has been about other mediums and it has so many body connotations to it. You know, even the terms we have in it are to do so much about the body and pushing out and, you know, we're reproducing. And I have that with me still. And also the artist I mentioned Nasreen Mohamedi, the essay on her by Geeta Kapur. I could send it to you and even her journals. These writings are very important to me. I've still carried them. But what I think someone once said to me, it won’t be a piece of writing, but in one of my one of my critiques back in undergrad was, don't let this turn into a formula. So I think about that a lot. When I'm doing something and trying to replicate something. I want to do it perhaps because of some intuition, but you shouldn't do it because of reasons that don't suit you or that you can't articulate. What you can infer from “don’t let this turn into a formula”, if you are stuck somewhere and you continue doing something that you're not enjoying, and think about if this is a formula for you.
There's this essay by Susan Sontag called Aesthetics of Silence*. There's a lot written about silence and language and uses of language in it. So I would think about that essay or even extracting some parts of that essay.
This is done if you want to check. [Both look at carved woodcut]
Ontological uncertainty, or ontological indefinity. I've stolen it from this other essay by Karen Barad*, and it's just on emptiness. It's not the title, but it's part of the title.
[Palak and Ray ink and print the woodblock]
On the SAIC Grad Show website, we do have a few images of my work. And I don't upload a lot on Instagram, but I'm working to build a website just to organize my work. And if you're interested, you can message me, perhaps, that would be great. Thank you.
References
Text
• Ana Mendieta, Emotional Artist, The Paris Review, March 2019
• The Wittgenstein Reader (second edition) by Anthony Kenny
• Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein
• The Parergon, Jacques Derrida and Craig Owens, October 1979, MIT Press
• Elegy for an Unclaimed Beloved by Geeta Kapur (first published as a part of her book When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India in 2000)
• Nasreen in Retrospect, the journals of Nasreen Mohamedi
• Karen Barad, What is the Measure of Nothingness? documenta (13)
• The re-vision of printmaking, Kathryn J Reeves, Purdue University, USA
• Susan Sontag, Aesthetics of Silence, Styles of Radical Will, 1967
Images
Zine
About the artist
Palak Patel
Instagram- @plakpatel22
Starting as a painter and venturing into printmaking, I began to deal with the interconnectedness between the media and the dissolving of the language associated with the process and finality of the making. I am witnessing the formation of a thesis on the print as an object, to elaborate more on its ontology as something that is birthed, felt, witnessed and exchanged; the evolving definition of print is both rudimentary and precise.The imprint begins from the practice of drawing from the body as it learns, records, remembers and repeats, daily as I encounter and abstract information. Currently based in Chicago, I moved here after receiving my Bachelors in Visual Arts from Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University, Vadodara in 2021.
