2023 Landscape Revisited
Having undertaken 4 days, 8 hours of day cycling on the back of a tandem in Italy I was inspired to make a series of works about the various liminal spaces observed as we moved through the landscape. Over the course of several weeks at South Hill Park print room, I developed a series of experimental prints using cross disciplinary methods alongside painting in my home studio, layering reality with memory.
Yas Jenkin's cycle from Maidenhead to Tunisia as part of her fundraiser campaign- GetOnTheBack.
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Exploring next techniques, I also developed work from digital negatives and watercolours back into print format via photogravure and solar plates.
Carving a 1.2 meter lino print become a Summer 2023 project prior to printing the edition on Japanese Shoji Paper Baika White.
2023 Ephemeral Series
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My 2022 work explores spatiotemporal boundaries and a journey through the natural and urban landscape. I try and break down an object to reinterpret it both sequentially and simultaneously creating a dialogue that investigates the purity and beauty of an image.
In Ways of Being Alive (Polity, 2022), French philosopher Baptise Morizot notes: “By no longer paying attention to the living world, to other species, to other environments, to the ecological dynamics that weave everyone together, we are creating from scratch a mute and absurd cosmo”.
The series of screen prints I have been working on since January 2022 has been about the appreciation of opulent nature post-pandemic. The prints feature silhouettes of plants in isolation alongside patterns and codes resembling the amount of time we spend in the digital realm. Having produced a number of etchings from copper plates, I am currently exploring the aquatint and mezzotint process and developing an edition of circular plate prints of the moon.
Image making
I see every print as an allegory in itself, with its fragments of the history of tradition and image-making coming together as a dialogue that investigates the process and beauty of an image. While my work is varied in practice, it stems from observations of landscapes and architecture via their construction or deconstruction and how this assembly or disassembly can be created by selected printmaking processes. My work often plays with the idea of a fake narrative or tries to emulate an experience, process or memory.
Having explored etching, monotypes, intaglio, screen prints and photogravure, I sometimes play moving an image through several processes or using film photography, creating digital negatives to manipulate with Photoshop before creating back into traditional print, transposing something from traditional methods of working, through the modern methods and back into an archival image.
I'm driven to make new images through a variety of process: Lino, intaglio, etching, monoprints, darkroom photography, screen prints and painting.
Hand Printed
Every unique edition is conceived and printed using traditional methods and practices.
Screen Printing
Printing Process
Screen Printing:
A screen mesh is coated with a photosensitive emulsion and an image or object’s silhouette can be exposed with UV light on a vacuum bed. Once the stencil has been washed and dried, inks can be mixed and pushed through the stencil using a vacuum screen printing bed and squeegee. Each image in an individual screen and different stencils can be printed over each other. Adhesive can be printed and then embellished with gold leaf.
Etching
Etching:
A wax ground is applied to a copper or zinc plate. This can be scratched into with an etching needle, when the plate is submerged in ferric chloride acid the lines drawn will be etched. When the plate is cleaned and the ground removed, it can be heated and inked up, ink is forced into the burr lines. This is then printed on damp specialist paper using a mangle or hydraulic printing press.
