IMPACT Printmaking Journal

Experimental Printmaking on Handmade Paper

Heike Berl — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Paper is a material that has inspired me time and again. To this day, its versatile properties have fascinated me, presenting itself at times delicate, transparent or smooth, at other times opaque, stabile or vulnerable. During a semester as a visiting student at the paper workshop of the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, I honed my skills which I had previously acquired at the graphic workshops of the Dresden University of Fine Arts. I learnt the art of paper reliefs and editions – an experience that first inspired my graphic work, and which in the long run has manifested itself in my current work, the relief-like folding of large-scale papers and the unique pieces in series. The essay reflects on experimental printmaking on handmade paper as an artistic source of expression. It explores the possibilities for creating graphic editions reviewing selected prints in various techniques on handmade paper.

The Intra-action of Paper and Hedgerow Chemistry

Rachel Marsh — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Creating a printed keepsake celebrating Richard Powers’ novel The Overstory provided the opportunity to develop a material ecopoetry, that enables the non-human and human to create meaning together, in sympoiesis (Haraway, 2016), through material semiotics. I explored wood-pulp free papers, and let tannins, iron salts and wood ash alkalis intra-act on the page – letting the matter speak for itself. After experimenting with papers made from cotton, bamboo and agricultural waste, I found that PaperWise, made from agricultural waste was able to withstand repeated wetting from the dye process, and also took letterpress print very well. I discovered that PaperWise is not the first paper to be made from agricultural waste and that it has a lower carbon footprint than paper made from wood-pulp and recycled paper. Rigby (2004) advocates for a ‘negative ecopoetics’ which points beyond the words – and I responded to this in letterpress print, by over-printing two different texts on the page, effectively self-cancelling both. I hope that the keepsake recipients read and interpret both the non-human and the human elements as a whole – the paper, dye, modifiers, and letterpress print – as an ‘ecology of texts’ (Calhoun, 2020).

Expanding Paper Practice

Kimberly Hall — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I ran a handprinted wallpaper studio from 2015 until I moved to the UK in 2021. My wallpapers were narrative explorations of pattern across the printed surface of paper that would cover entire walls in an endless repeat. I used research practices to develop symbols, meanings and stories through residencies at museums, recycling centres, and science labs.

After my studio closed, I began exploring papier-mâché as an alternative practice and found a new relationship to paper. As an illustrator I had never considered paper as a 3D material, always as a surface. The transition has changed my practice significantly, even though many of my tools remain the same. My work is still primarily for home, but my process has evolved because of my new approach to paper. In this article I’ll explore developments in storytelling on paper in three-dimensional formats, particularly around shape, context, and audience interaction.

I’ll trace histories of storytelling through a variety of illustrators and artists exploring paper beyond the two-dimensional surface, from collage artists like Scott Ramsay Kyle and paper cutters like Rob Ryan. Finally, I’ll draw parallels with an exploration of other American practitioners working with papier-mache and sculptural forms of paper like Bernie Kaminski and Lydia Ricci to ground my ideas of how storytelling can benefit from paper as material.

From Source to Sheet

Katherine Van Uytrecht, Laila, Dima — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This article documents a search for local fine art papermakers in Egypt, specifically in Cairo. Egypt has a long history of papermaking and bookbinding. However, aside from papyrus manufacturing for the tourist industry, locally produced cotton or other fine art papers are not apparent.

The Design Workshops at GUC currently use imported papers which are usually produced to supply commercial print industries. As these workshops support Graphic Design students, the focus tends to move away from fine art papers towards papers suited for mass production.

This research aims to find local paper mills or local artisan papermakers who produce paper suitable for fine art printmaking, bookbinding and self-publishing.

The paper market in Cairo is unstable; import costs increase rapidly, import regulations change, suitable paper can be found once and not again, and the naming of paper is inconsistent. By increasing knowledge of local industry, improving the local supplier base, and supporting local makers, the researchers seek to give students the opportunity to explore the full potential of paper on offer in Egypt.

This essay includes a brief history of papermaking in Egypt, and seeks to locate and document local makers and small mills in Cairo, that produce papers suitable for fine art printmaking, bookbinding and self-publishing. The research includes field work and interviews, visiting local paper markets, commercial factories, and artisans to highlight and promote local makers.

Paper as a Responsive Threshold

Montana Torrey — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This practice-based research positions paper as a surface-ground mediator and responsive threshold in collagraph printmaking. Developed through a series of site visits in southern Finland, I incorporate locally sourced materials such as crushed granite and mineral sediment that are then embedded within collagraph plates. Here, the matrix itself becomes a geological assemblage of surface scatters, and paper becomes translated into another surface assemblage through pressure. Paper takes on the role of a surficial interface between the plate and its own ability to determine how matter is absorbed, distributed, recorded, and embossed with each imprint. Unfolding through cycles of printing and reprinting, I test how material correspondences evolve under differing pressures, conditions, and the degradation of the plate structure. With each pass through the press, the dialogue between field-gathered material and studio-based processes is intertwined, and the printed surface emerges as a record of materials in flux. Paper becomes the interplay between the absence and presence of matter, gathering the dispersed materialities of the plate’s geological assemblage into a coherent form that takes shape through its own materiality. The resulting surficial dialogue reveals paper’s ability to function as a stratigraphic correspondence, and an evolving relation of duration and event. This research seeks to contribute to current conversations surrounding paper’s performative abilities within printmaking practices that align with the symposium’s focus on material and process-based inquiry.

An An Entanglement of Art and Science in Paper.

Johanna Love — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This paper examines the relationship between image, material, and human perception through the intersection of printmaking, imaging technologies, and scientific inquiry. As an image-maker, I consider every image to be in collaboration with paper — whether as a support for drawing, print, or digital image. Paper does not merely hold the image but actively informs and transforms it. This relationship is continually shifting, producing meaning through touch, weight, and surface.

This research explores how images might not simply depict the world but express how we see through it — how perception itself can be materially embodied to speak about something unspeakable, about the shadow and weight of material and time.

Working with a fifteenth-century reliquary—a unique devotional object containing fragments of bone and, remarkably, its own gathered dust, a series of artworks intertwine technologies of imaging across art and science to push this relationship to extremes. Small bound paper books and large double sheets become experimental sites where printed and laser etched images and material intertwine; images appear upon, beneath, and within paper, suspended, as if caught somewhere between a cobweb and a fossil.

Rooted in long-term interdisciplinary research around the subject of dust, the paper situates this practice within projects developed with the Natural History Museum, London, and Kloster Bentlage Museum in Germany. These projects investigate how microscopic imaging and print processes can evoke the emotional and temporal charge of materials and the weight of time.

By positioning printmaking as a site where art and science converge, this paper proposes that image and material co-produce knowledge: to propose ways of understanding the complexities of the world through its most delicate and elusive material forms.

Dust Forest

Emilia Telese — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Dust Forest and Suite for an Imaginary Forest are contemporary printmaking works developed through an ongoing collaboration between artist Dr Emilia Telese and environmental scientist Dr Pavla Dagsson-Waldhauserová, investigating Iceland’s Arctic desert ecosystems and the circulation of high-latitude dust. Drawing on glacial erosion, historical deforestation and atmospheric transport, the works use Icelandic dust, mineral pigment and paper as active. Through monotype, engraving and collagraph processes, geological and climatic transformations are translated into material encounters grounded in time-based processes.

In this paper, Dr Emilia Telese situates these works within arts–science discourse as a parallel mode of inquiry rather than a didactic or illustrative response to scientific research. Central to the analysis is the role of paper as a site of externalised memory, aligned with Bernard Stiegler’s (1998) concept of tertiary memory, in which traces of human and geological time persist beyond the body through technical supports. Paper is examined historically, epistemically and materially, as a vulnerable, responsive surface shaped by the artist’s hands and environmental forces.

By foregrounding fragility, loss and material agency, Dust Forest proposes a reading of her printmaking practice as a medium for the ecological attunement of attention, where memory, matter and scientific knowledge converge through embodied processes.

Drawing on Ingold’s notion of materials as “gatherings of the world” (Ingold, 2013), Bennett’s theory of “vibrant matter” (Bennett, 2010), and Haraway’s call to “stay with the trouble” (Haraway, 2016), this practice-led research situates printmaking as and embodied memory, where print is an interface between scientific observation and poetic perception, translating environmental processes into tangible form.

Unfolding peripheral acts

Miriam Hancill — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

peripheral acts (2023-ongoing) is a body of 30 monoprints on Japanese paper. Created as part of my practice-based doctoral project, Obdurate matter? Unfolding potential in materials, apparatuses, and procedures of printmaking through speculative practice (2021-2025), at Edinburgh College of Art, the series of prints explores the possibilities held within the repeated printing of scrim fabric in CMYK formation.

Through instances of visual, material, and processual variation – apparent in each print's differing colour, tone, and moiré patterning; in impressions of scrim's irregular and fluid weave, and moments of human error – the works draw out and attend to the ways in which unanticipated, and perhaps even unwanted, variation within repetitive printerly acts can prove to be generative. Positioned in the context of the printed 'error', the perceived awkwardness and discomfort in such interfering factors are presented as both practical and conceptual thresholds where inherited conventional perceptions can be renegotiated.

In this text, I consider how my choice of substrate for peripheral acts – tosa washi paper – serves to extend the themes and position outlined above. Through examination of the paper's materiality, physicality, and behaviour, between contexts of the print workshop, the artist's studio, and the exhibition site, I explore how the works unveil the liveliness of printed matter.

This discussion draws from theories of 'the fold' (Deleuze 1993; Marks 2014), in addition the field of new materialism and the works of Barad (2007), Bennett (2010), and Coleman, Page, and Palmer (2019) to speculate as to how print matter can come to unfold in practice. It seeks to uncover a new or overlooked printerly vibrancy, and consider the possible effects of this approach in the context of contemporary printmaking and the expanded field.

The Invisible Paper

Monika Rycerz — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Paper is an inherently crucial element in the printmaking process. Its texture, weight, tone, and surface quality all influence the outcome of an image and the artist’s engagement with it. Within print studios, certain papers are celebrated for their archival properties and their capacity to elevate a print. Yet alongside these prized materials exists a humbler, often overlooked counterpart: newsprint.

This article proposes to re-evaluate the role of newsprint within the fine art printmaking discipline. Typically dismissed for its instability and lack of archival value, newsprint occupies a paradoxical position - indispensable in practice yet rarely acknowledged as an artistic substrate. It functions as a tool of protection, testing, and troubleshooting: a silent enabler in the printmaking process. Its low cost allows artists to take risks, make mistakes, and relinquish the anxiety of preciousness. This echoes Tim Ingold’s view of materials as thinking tools, active participants in the making process rather than passive substrates. By bringing this “invisible” paper to the forefront, the author explores its material and conceptual significance.

In a world saturated with material excess, newsprint’s tendency to fade and disintegrate might instead represent a form of care - an ethical and ecological position that values disappearance as much as endurance.