Potatoprint festival is trying to offer a cheap and environmental friendly alternative to the established traditional techniques of graphic and to the newborn cult of digital printmaking both of which seem to have lost natural playfulness and way to fast expression. With potatoprint festival we are trying to go back to the basic of graphics and printmaking all together; back to the desire to reproduce an image, to leave a mark.

The advantages of potatoprinting compared to other techniques are that it’s so easily available. Instead of chemicals, printing press, acids, special printing colours, special papers, metal plates or stones you can use things found in nearly all households; potatoes, knives, what ever paper or textile at hand and colours based on water. As potatoprint can be made outside in the fresh air and doesn’t require any unhealthy materials it is a technique offering urbanised artist a good possibility to get out the musty room, to sense the nature and get hands into work.

Although many of us has had their contact with potatoprinting in kindergarten or at primary school -where it has been used as an exercise of manual skills- almost no-one has come to face it afterwards. As it has become clear the technique offers -despite of the appearing robustness- a lot of possibilities for artistic expression and sets a challenge even to the professional artist at the same time being easy for the beginners to get started with. During the festivals there has even formed two groups, one that prefers new potato, which is stiff and makes possible to print more detailed figures needing the same time more gentle hand for cutting, the other group preferring one year old potatoes that always print the entire surface but distorts the figure slightly. Even the sprouts and the wrinkled skin of the old potato have found their use in the process of print making. The first festival was largely dedicated to discovering the printing possibilities and potato as a tool. With the second festival we tried to make use the found possibilities in a wider scale and take advantage of them in a more complete way, aiming knowingly towards making independent works of art.

Beside environmental friendliness, do-it-yourself joy, cheap materials and spreading the word of primitive printmaking the festivals idea is bound to potato as essential part of estonians everyday life. Despite the old sayings like “beauty ain’t born to be put in to the pot” and “don’t play with food” we are trying -by discovering potato as a printing tool- to celebrate its importance in estonian culture, to find for it other uses beside being under the sauce.
Potatoprint festival is not trying to be an elite arthappening but to combine the art of alternative printing, relaxing stay in outside air and the creating of new friendships before the hasty work period of autumn-winter.