Katherine Loudoun

Artist Statement MA Fine Art (Online)

Falmouth

  

My practice is rooted in observations of constructing space in a pictorial plane. Assembly and mark-making can be translated through the physical language of printmaking. I see each print as an allegory in its own right, bringing together fragments of historical tradition, methods of making and material processes to explore the construction, transformation and beauty of an image.

​

My degree show was conceived as a homage to the Society of Painter-Printmakers and to the history of image-making. The work focused on the eighteenth-century landscape, Gilpin’s views on the beautiful and picturesque, drawing on imagery from Stowe, Stourhead and Pains Hill Park. I constructed fictional narratives from these historic landscapes, exploring how the picturesque landscape can become both a physical site and an imagined one.

Printmaking grounds me: it is an experimental, process-led medium requiring play, dedication and research. Like ink itself, it can meander in unpredictable directions, allowing ideas to develop gradually. The technical demands, the precise timings, measurements and the reverse engineering of an image into layers, require meticulous planning, yet the final outcome remains open to chance and serendipity. I am particularly drawn to this tension between control and unpredictability.

​

My practice stems from a painterly approach to printmaking, using process-heavy and labour-intensive techniques including etching, engraving, lino and screen printing. Intaglio and relief processes are inherently spatiotemporal: plates accumulate traces of the actions performed upon them and become relics of the time spent making. The systematic creation of a mark and the controlled inking and wiping of a plate contrast with the chaotic behaviour of ink, creating a dialogue between precision and accident.

​

I frequently move images between different collaborative media; an image may begin as a technical drawing, become a watercolour and then be translated onto a solar plate, as in Esoteric Decay. Elsewhere, I use film photography to create digital negatives, manipulate them digitally and then return to traditional printmaking processes. In works such as Eden and Valhalla, this movement between analogue and digital creates a visual record of transformation.

Currently visual language of machines and the looming presence of AI inspires my practice. The resulting hand-printed images are then going to be fed back into AI, generating new interpretations and imagined printed machines. This creates a feedback loop between the handmade and the digital, reflecting AI’s ability to process, reinterpret and construct new narratives from existing imagery.  This process raises questions around the aura of the original. 

​

The relationship between perception, reproduction, machinery and image-making is central to this enquiry. Dziga Vertov’s concept of the ‘mechanical eye’, Walter Benjamin’s age of mechanical reproduction and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s ideas around embodied perception prompt me to consider where the artist’s body, hand and physical gestures sit within an age of AI. Ultimately, my practice occupies the space between hand and machine, original and reproduction, control and chance. Through the brevity, physicality and imperfection of printmaking, I explore how we construct, perceive and remake images in a technological age.