get to know us
Allison Koch and Leigh Sabisch are good printmakers but better pals. Together, we make up Sardine Press- a print studio founded on the desire to play. We both love the act of creating and work to see how far we can push that in the realm of printmaking. Between pulling prints, you can find us drinking martinis, eating hot dogs, and cackling at the absurdity of life.
At Sardine Press we encourage both the artistic community and those just getting their feet wet to learn about and create work in the field we feel so passionate about- so much so that we created a mobile studio* to share the medium wherever our hearts take us.
*(completion of the mobile studio is on pause until the return of any semblance of hope for the future.)
what drives us to create?
Sabisch’s work explores the disconnect between physical and emotional relationships. Through twisted and intertwined faceless figures, she focuses on the intimacy, dependency, and importance of touch. Each scene is a snapshot of intimacy. Each push and pull, each grip and grasp, creates a freeze frame of that intangible, familiar, cozy memory of attachment. Creating art is an intimate and introspective experience- creating art with another like-minded artist and friend mirrors the intimacy that Sabisch focuses on in her work. It explores a new level of what a relationship entails and how that can be translated into a visual, material product.
When asked to explain the motivation behind her work, Koch will often reply, “I just like to make stuff.” The answer may sound pointedly aloof, but it is not a brush off. Koch finds printmaking a reprieve from an internalized chaos. There are rules and protocols to follow, and cleanliness is a must; when making an edition, if a print isn’t an exact match to the prior, it goes in the bin. Her imagery is often centered on jumbled items such as piles of strings, twisted and knotted. Her monotypes appear chaotic, a random assortment of marks, twists and turns, but each move is assessed and reassessed. By making jumbled, tangible “stuff,” she distracts herself from the jumbled, messy world in which she finds herself, all the while considering the traditions of fine art printmaking.