Being in coronavirus lockdown mode with only a small print press for creative company can, in some ways, be a good thing. It has meant that I have had to be more resourceful and, perhaps, more inventive in the way I approach my image-making.
Alongside the Flexure pieces I posted on back in January, recently I have been raiding my portfolios for pieces of ‘failed’ prints. Often, these unsuccessful prints consist of interesting-looking pieces of paper that, for various reasons, stuck to the printing plate. So, last week I started looking again at these fragments to see what I could do with them. I had seen some examples of collages by printmakers and other artists working in a variety of different media, all of which looked really interesting. Often though, I thought that many of these works perhaps tried too hard to make discernable pictures from the juxtaposed pieces. Instead, I thought it might be more interesting to use the same abstract approach to image selection/creation that I use in my usual process: materials > plate > print. This would just mean responding to the fragments in a quick and viceral manner, to produce something that instantly looks or feels right.
As you can see, sometimes the image involved two or more pieces, or just one. Right now, these works don’t yet exist as finished pieces – the photographs are a record of the juxtapositions for each one, so I’ll wait until lockdown ends before deciding how to make them real. I’m impatient to see how they will look inside a nice frame, perhaps raised (float-mounted) to accentuate their three-dimensional forms.
Find all my posts about my print stories on Twitter at: #artprintstories