Printing the weather: the language of rain as a source for an evolving print landscape.

Abstract

Contemporary printmaking has introduced unusual combinations of techniques and materials, extreme scales or incorporation into three-dimensional constructions. While some printmakers remain faithful to traditional printing techniques, others have begun to extend practices towards an expanded field, in which printmaking enters into dialogues with other and non-human languages. In this article I investigate the intersection of printmaking and rain in the work of Dutch designer Aliki van der Kruijs. Developing a technique she termed ‘pluviagraphy’ to record visually rain events at particular coordinates of time-space, her ‘Made by Rain’ series probes the relations between weather, matter, colour, time and space. Looking across the prints featured in this article, the question arises how falling rain as part of the material world becomes part of that recorded world when registered as a mark on a surface. Further, how printmakers might work with different surfaces to begin to probe such questions. A key concern of van der Kruijs practice is the reframing of printmaking as a liminal site of interdisciplinarity in the context of examining the surfaces between adjacent disciplines. This manifests in a visual conversation informed by the rhythm of the rainfall and printmaking process. The result is an expanding body of research surrounding interdisciplinary practice, mark-making and how printmaking might function at the boundaries of other disciplines.