Intensively Fast and Intensively Slow: Encountering Movement and Stillness Through Printmaking Practices

Abstract

This paper takes embodied experiences of printmaking as its point of departure and examines two artworks, Susanna Castleden’s 1:1 Gangway (2016) and Lydia Trethewey’s Interstices (2017), in order to elucidate thepresence of stillness and movement in time-intensive practices. Underpinned by a curiosity of fast-slow dynamics and continuums, and informed by cultural geography, these works probe mobile relationships revealed in cruise ship and car travel respectively. Through the use of frottage and stop-motion animation, the mobility-immobility dichotomy is challenged, thereby intimating at an understanding of pause, place and pace as mutually enfolded. Importantly, both of these technical processes are laborious and foreground the artist’s body in a time-based connection with the work; accelerated and protracted. In effect, the body becomes a fulcrum for considering notions of passage and terminus. As co-authors analysing the parallels in these approaches to making, the concept of prints as mimetic reproductions is also interrogated. The printmaker is considered in these time- intensive encounters as both composer and performer, disrupting exactness through hands
in motion, within a mutable world. By scrutinising the intersections of 1:1 Gangway and Interstices, this paper thus points towards expanded understandings of time-intensive printmaking that have arisen primarily through practice itself.