IMPACT Printmaking Journal

Making No Bones About It

Carol Wyss — 2024-07-24

What is the connection between the body, mind, and information? Can information be physical or, to turn it around, can the body and mind be ‘just’ information? Where is the meaning of that information? Moreover, crucially, are we losing the connection to our physical selves by incessantly processing life through information?

Print No Border

Laura Bortoloni — 2024-07-24

As borders gradually open up once again, the consequences of the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic are casting light on the renewed importance of regional and national borders. This is also true of European national borders – which had already been tested by the intensification of migratory flows and populist impulses – now in the process of becoming unwilling symbols of the restrictions ushered in by the pandemic. Closed for months, or at the very least made difficult to get through by health-related restrictions, the internal EU national borders that European peoples were coming to think of as a thing of the past were, quite suddenly, extremely concrete once again. This is a process that has been brought even more dramatically to the fore by the tragedy of the war in Ukraine.

From the starting point of these premises, the Print no border project explored the border and frontier concepts via xylographic practice, juxtaposing, stratifying, and comparing the geographical representation of boundaries with images borrowed from nature and the man-made elements that boundaries cut through.

Concurrently Simultaneously

Killian Dunne — 2024-07-24

Concurrently Simultaneously is a book that contains not only the art and academic research and explorations of two artists but also a more intimate narrative of the experience of a family momentarily divided by the implications of Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic.

On 30 August 2020, Killian Dunne arrived in Scotland from Ecuador to begin his new role as a Lecturer in Printmaking, Publishing, and Editions at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee. His wife Désirée and their three-year-old son were to stay in Quito, Ecuador until Christmas while he organised accommodation for the family and while Désirée concluded her university teaching semester. Unfortunately, COVID-19 restrictions and the complications of Brexit meant that by May 2021 Désirée and their son had still not arrived in Scotland. At that point, the artists decided to create an artist book responding to this experience. Killian created his section of the book in Scotland, and Désirée created her section of the book in Ecuador. They then digitally printed the book’s editions in Ecuador and Désirée brought the books to their new life in Scotland when she and their son could travel.

Termómetros - Visual Registration of Nature and its Changes

Elba Ireri Topete Camacho — 2024-07-24

The following document presents the results of the research-creation project THERMOMETERS, Visual registration of nature and its changes, which consists of exploring various possibilities of fusion and technical variations of engraving and drawing to produce artists’ books, as an alternative to contemporary graphic prints. The project consisted of the creation of three series of artists’ books in concertina, polyptych, and expandable formats. The thematic axis was the visual record of nature and its changes throughout the period covered by the project.

ETC Press: Two Decades of Transatlantic Collaboration

Cynthia Lollis — 2024-07-24

ETC Press is an international collaboration between two women: Daniela Deeg (Germany) and Cynthia Lollis (USA). We make prints and artists’ books, often travelling together to gather images and absorb the character of countries other than our own, where we are outsiders together. Our books combine text with drawings and photographs made from our travels to places like Venice, Rome, New York, Copenhagen, Vienna, and London. We have also created pieces comparing our two countries, languages, and backgrounds. Our paper will recount a variety of themes, challenges, and methods of production that we have embraced while working together for two decades as ETC Press.

Enacting Parts

Heather Leier — 2024-07-24

I have lived in Mohkínstsis/Calgary for four years, most of which have been marked by the pandemic that is ongoing as I write this. I highlight this here because my physical, social, and cultural connections with this city are limited. However, given the circumstances, I had the privilege and opportunity to connect with the land and the non-human world around me. Walking, a privilege that allowed me to engage with places I have visited and lived in throughout my life, has been particularly significant during the pandemic. Walking through the northwest suburbs of this city has allowed me to foster a relationship with the land, which now animates my practice. In the spirit of respect, reciprocity, and truth, I acknowledge that I am an uninvited white settler occupying this land, which forms the traditional territories of the Blackfoot Confederacy (Siksika, Piikani, Kanai First Nations), the Tsuut’ina First Nation, and the Stoney Nakoda (Chiniki, Bearspaw, and Wesley First Nations). This territory is also home to the Métis Nation of Alberta, Region 3. I am grateful to be situated here, and through my work, I aim to honour the land and all its forms, taking greater responsibility for my presence and potential future in this place.

Devaneios

Eliana Ambrosio — 2024-07-24

Reflecting on the creative act is an important moment of pause for us to understand the paths that feed our processes, evaluate the transformations our practices have taken, and delve more deeply into our artistic work.

During the creative process, the artist uses an initial idea, which is often reconfigured after a period of maturation, reflection, and experimentation. This investigative trajectory is permeated by doubts and uncertainties, tests, errors, abandonments, successes, revisions, deviations, migrations, expansions, ramifications, and new inspirations; a constant advance and retreat of possibilities lead to the realisation of the work, the emergence of other works or new areas of interest to be investigated. It is a process of constant metamorphosis, which requires moments of distance from the artist for the maturation of their aesthetic issues.

Grave / Grebh / Græf

Kathryn Poole — 2024-07-24

Through this paper and research project, I explore the question of how the resting place of the body can become a catalyst for growth. Grave/Grebh/ Græf explores the potential for metamorphosis and renewal through the liveliness of decay. My practice originally centred on the corpse itself, tracking the decay of individual animals found on the roadside to try to capture the last residual trace of the spirit after the body has gone. I am now searching for these traces in the vegetation that grows from their resting places.

Grave/Grebh/Græf examines various burial sites through observational drawing and grieving rituals. The drawings require intense periods, focus, respect, and reverence, paralleling the intention of the rosary prayers or other devotional obits repetitively performed by parishioners to preserve the memory of the deceased. Gallagher and Hiller (2011, p. 17) said, “That we who are still alive must perform obligatory tasks to care for the needy dead is a powerful, nearly universal human belief.” We choose to notice and attend to the familiar through that attention. To notice is to care.

The Semiotic Situation

Sandra De Rycker — 2024-07-24

In summer of 2021, a project began with Rae- Yen Song’s visit to the Print Studio, our first collaboration in some time since the pandemic1 began. Though social restrictions on how the spaces of the Print Studio were used continued, prioritising individual working and distance where possible, Song visited the Studio to begin conversations around print possibilities alongside a planned solo exhibition titled i in DCA’s galleries.

These conversations began together with Annis Fitzhugh, Head of Print Studio at DCA, whose open- ended approach to collaborative experimentation in print as a method of invention is at the core of this research.2 Song introduced key concepts of narrative agency over the familial oral histories, memories and mythologies behind the exhibition, a sculptural environment based on what Song described as an ‘imagined dialogue with a long- departed grandfather...a being from another time and place, and my conversation with him addresses crossing, migration, loss, survival and labour’.

Theme: Memory, Repair, and Creative Recovery

Sara Bowen — 2024-07-24

This presentation centres upon a collaborative project called BookArtObject, a long-term artist book group project based in Australia. Since starting in 2009 after a conversation between Caren Florance and Sara Bowen during a bookmaking workshop, the project has varied wildly in scale and scope. The primary concept is for participants to respond creatively to a published text, whether it is poetry, fiction, or non-fiction.

Olhava as Seen from the Map of Volkhov

Outi Koivisto — 2024-07-24

The starting point for my artistic research doctoral dissertation is to examine place through common names and how language is, through names, a part of a space. In the municipality of Ii (Finland), there is a village called Olhava. The town of Volkhov in Russia is also called Olhava in Finnish. For my research, I worked in the surroundings of Olhava (Ii, Finland) by using a map of Volkhov (Olhava, Russia), collecting data, and creating an installation based on these data. Nonsense theories and the psychogeography methods of International Situationists play a central role in this work.

Deconstructing the Printing Process:

Caroline Gagnon — 2024-07-24

Over my years of practice in lithography, I have become more interested in printmaking as a process and an experience than in the result. My attention is focused on the repeated gestures and the qualities of the materials as they transform. It was by noticing a shift in the gesture-trace-imprint relationship in my process that I sought to deconstruct the process and transpose it to other mediums. It is this reflection on the imprint’s inability to capture movement, to grasp the time of the image that is being made, which leads me to transpose the paradigm of the print into my installations. Thus, I present the image in its different states, from the fluid material of the wash to the printed image. I deconstruct the printing process to show it as a series of gestures and transformations, each with an imaging potential.

Impression / Expression

Veronica Noriega Esquives — 2024-07-24

In this paper, I will ponder my connection with printmaking not only as a professor, artist, and researcher but also as a Spanish speaker who is interested in the fact that Spanish-speaking and English-speaking nations use different expressions to refer to this artistic discipline. In addition, I will reflect on how these expressions could interfere with the way I relate to my creative process. I will not go deeply into specific linguistic studies, just enough observations to make my point.

Print Culture and The Spectacle 2.0

Matthew Newkirk — 2024-07-24

This paper describes creative printmaking practices that employ art as a platform for alternative voices that critique DeBord’s modern-day exploitation systems in the Society of the Spectacle1 (Debord, 1967). The specific art practices discussed aim to tempt mainstream participants caught within the Spectacle’s cycle to recognise, evaluate, and reconsider the impact these systems have on contemporary society.

The creative industries have spent much time ‘on mute’ throughout the past two years. While navigating the ever-changing lockdowns and restrictions, art practitioners – whose role is often to bring people together physically – have been forced to operate in isolation from behind a keyboard. As visual practitioners, we must speak out in response to these COVID-related paradigm shifts with the most effective post-pandemic voice we can muster: our art practice. This paper suggests that a potent reaction to our impacted creative lives comes from understanding how the Spectacle’s mechanisms operate in a contemporary sense during this pandemic. At the same time, it discusses how art can be used to challenge the principles and ethics of a culture caught within the Spectacle.

The paper also discusses historical and contemporary artists and art practices that utilise the same techniques, mediums, and frameworks employed by the Spectacle to expose the mechanisms of present-day Spectacle 2.0. These artists, who draw from print culture, utilise methodologies that successfully navigate the risks of becoming part of the ongoing cycle that the Spectacle perpetuates.

Touching Visions

Caroline Areskog Jones — 2024-07-24

Throughout the enforced stasis of lockdowns and without studio access, I began thinking about the process of “epistemological gathering”, a term outlined by artist Nanna Debois Buhl, asking myself how it may be possible to use the air to make a series of works with a lightness of touch entitled ‘Touching Visions: Speculative Imaginaries’. In parallel, and along a line of singularity expected of a rhizomatic practice, this body of work partially evolved as a written response to a question posed by the Venti journal “How to Feel the Air”, since published online. The progressive evolution of some of these ideas is presented in this reflective paper.

Amongst the recent chaos within moments of stillness, stepping outside into the air presented an opportunity to reflect upon an ecology of practice that overlaps elements of drawing, printing, and moving images through a process of exploring materials. Throughout this extraordinary time, whilst caring for family, I observed more closely the details of what I saw more expansively through joining a variety of online seminars across a range of subjects including a discussion on democracy and a reading group focussed on the politics of care.

The Dark Side of Printmaking

Paula Smithson — 2024-07-24

This presentation examines print as a platform of multiple dimensions, providing an essential link between the traditions of handmade print and the use of new technologies. Exploring the potential of scale using photopolymer intaglio-type printing, using the material capabilities of the printed surface to connect what is viewed and experienced, I will reflect on my experience of this medium along with the research methods, practices, and technologies. More directly, this body of work considers ideas around the re-interpretation and repositioning of traditional printmaking skills and processes as part of a wider cross-disciplinary art practice. Large intaglio plates incorporate photopolymer technology to offer a view combining digital interpretation with the traditions of the hand-created mark and printed intaglio surface, resulting in a re-imagined vision linking digital aesthetics.

The Messiness is the Message

Sally Clegg — 2024-07-24

Once, in a dinner conversation with another printmaker I had just met at a prominent craft school, he started joking about monotypes. He was a woodcut artist, and I had told him that while my art practice is multi-disciplinary, copper plate etching is the medium that I return to most faithfully. We compared notes about our print practices, and when the subject of monotypes arose, with playful contemptuousness, my new friend referred to these as “squished paintings.” This broke the ice, and we both laughed. For the rest of the meal, we continued to bond over the pleasing arduousness of our relative preferred printmaking processes, the potential messiness and apparently unsettling immediacy of monoprinting, and the general viewing public’s overall indifference to the differences between, say, a woodcut, an etching, and a monotype.

Considering my apparent unease with the medium, ironically, the work of art that has most consumed my thoughts in recent years is a 1997 trace monotype by the ultra-famous Tracey Emin, a 59 x 73 cm print depicting a relaxed female figure sitting on a sofa. Her eyes are shut and her legs are open; she appears to be masturbating. Above and to the left of the figure floats an indiscernible object. Below the image are the words “I USED TO HAVE SUCH A GOOD IMAGINATION,” which is also the title of the piece. Both Ns in “Imagination” are backward, an indication that Emin drew this through the back of the paper, and perhaps quite quickly.

Print, Body, and Memory

Oliver Hambsch — 2024-07-24

When I started my Master of Fine Arts degree in 2020, I was interested in how the way memory is perceived and experienced can be expressed through printmaking, both in method and in content. Two months into my studies, South Africa entered a hard lockdown, and universities were closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. I lost access to my studio and had to pivot from my usual practice – which required the use of presses, darkrooms, and solvents – to one that could easily be undertaken in a small apartment. I shifted to creating detailed linocuts, which eventually culminated in the production of several large woodcuts in 2021. The production and printing of woodcuts of that size required an unexpected degree of physical engagement. Due to the size of the blocks, I was unable to visually resolve the image I was working on. Touch and frottage became the only way for me to ‘see’ the image I was working on. The haptic engagement with the woodblocks, both in terms of production and perception, inspired the creation of a large-scale installation consisting of 150 graphite rubbings taken from the block, which were exhibited together with the prints and the woodblocks. My heightened awareness of my physical body during the production of the blocks, the subsequent labour of hand printing, and the creation of the frottage installation led me to reconsider my theoretical approach to memory and incorporate its material and physiological aspects into my work.

Print in Real Time 2019-24

Rita Marhaug — 2024-07-24

It is a great pleasure to present Trykk i sanntid, “Print in Real Time”, a five-year art project born in Lofoten in Northern Norway, which has now reached its halfway point. The project started due to the need to showcase Lofoten´s new printmaking workshop, in a way rooted in something important to us.

Over several years, with limited funds and great enthusiasm, my colleague Kjellaug Hatlen Lunde has built up the printmaking workshop KK-trykk, “KK-print”, which was inaugurated in 2019. The workshop is a part of the joint studio complex and residency centre Kunstkvarteret, located in the middle of Lofoten, established in 2008. Here, four artists have permanent studio spaces while others rent or apply for residency stays for varying durations. In the spring of 2019, Hatlen Lunde contacted our experienced colleague Åse Anda and me with the vague idea of developing some kind of event to promote the new workshop.

Reflective Paper

Maite Pinto — 2024-07-24

This article aims to investigate the changes that have been generated in archival systems through digitisation and the relevance of reactivating archives through artistic creation and specifically through printmaking. In this paper, I will present some projects from my practice to analyse the meaning of these new physical forms created from diverse archives.

Digital technology has transformed the way we communicate and store information. Today’s images are virtual and fleeting; they slip from our memory, prompting the question of how much time we spend examining/absorbing an image. Why store thousands of images if we never revisit them? Archival information today is digitally stored and recorded, but can we access it and which archives do we choose to recreate? By revisiting material from the past, we might better understand our present.

The relationship between archival materials and their stories as generators of new readings through artistic practice occupies a significant place in contemporary art research. In this study, I explore different photographic archives from my artistic practice, using graphic techniques that allow me to reflect on memory and its evanescence. My interest in working with these memories is related to the desire to share materials from the past and generate new relationships within our contemporary context. Working with various temporalities is an approach to understanding the functioning of both individual and collective memory