Stepping back a bit and trying to take this assignment as a whole, post-tutorial,  I can see themes and preoccupations emerging.

Art and Science

Firstly, the continuing association of art and science, through the use of chemical procedures, such as cyanotypes and photo polymers, and etching in different salts. There’s also the links to photography which are emerging more and more. 

These connections are coming out both in images and processes, with a key text being Kemp’s “Visualisations”, on the subject of the importance of and influence of analogies in understanding the unknown. The images I made of “moons” in the previous assignment morphed into Newton’s Apple, using the technique of chiaroscuro as created by lateral lighting, and inspired by 19th century photography of the moon, and of textured close up objects, a wrinkled hand and a wrinkled apple. These were photographic images as objects of scientific enquiry, whereby analogical thinking led to deductions about unknowable phenomena. (I’m thinking ahead to an enquiry into the appearance of a brain damaged by dementia as part of the “portrait” assignment, in which I plan to focus on my mother as a subject)

Image as object

This has led to the beginnings of an exploration of the unreliability of images, of images as objects whose form and meaning is determined by the processes of seeing and producing. After going through a series of images of a historical/biblical story, the interpretation of which is so open to biased representation and contextual understandings, I made a small model of a sculptural image, “facets” which links together ideas of media representation, conflicting lenses, the idea of “the gaze”, with connotations of feminism, distortion and self-regard,  which I would like to develop further. After discussion with my tutor, I understand how scale, shape and form of the sculptural piece would invite a viewer to engage with it in a particular way- for example, if it were scaled up to the shape and size of a body, it would invite that type of engagement, whereas it could be a landscape, a feature of a landscape such as a cave, or if dropped on the floor, scrunched up newspaper, and if hanging, then other analogies would come into play. This comes back to the power and influence of analogical thinking when interpreting the Unknown, and emphasises the role of culture in perceiving messages, thus leading to a theoretical stance that an image is a cultural object.

Xu Bing Parallel Project

This brings me back to the work of Xu Bing, and his appropriation of objects, signs and materials as a commentary on and creation of new cultural objects in his works. Text as object as a key feature of his work, in his use of tobacco company logos for example, although he works on a grand scale, creating his own languages, and challenging the way we read cultural signs: in his square-word calligraphy, he is also taking a swipe at mainland Chinese suppression of ideas by making the texts (characters)  “meaningless” in that culture. 

I continued the process of degrading materials, as I’d done earlier with copper, by creating a series of prints involving the staged destruction of a plate and the signs written on it, as a reflection and commentary on deterioration and loss, inspired by the work of Xu Bing, specifically the woodcut Series of Repetitions, but relating to the concept of metamorphosis, and the way that new objects and new signs and meanings emerge from the remnants of the older ones. The idea of process in these works would lend themselves to presentation in series, even, if I had enough images, as animation, although those are contrasting narratives. Xu Bing ‘s animation of the evolution of the Chinese character for “one” turned that into a history of the country and its politics, and could run on a loop, thus perhaps hopefully implying the “power of one”, whereas the Series of Repetition derives its pathos from the finality of the empty woodcut in plate 12. My own final image in the “greying” series is ambiguous, as it could be seen to have metamorphosed into a hopeful new sign. 

I’m contemplating whether I could make this sign a starting point in a portrait, linking birth and death in a cyclical progression: thinking of the Wordsworth quote from Intimations of Immortality:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:  

The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,

        Hath had elsewhere its setting,  

          And cometh from afar:  

        Not in entire forgetfulness,  

        And not in utter nakedness,  

But trailing clouds of glory do we come 

        From God, who is our home:

I’m also channeling TS Eliot’s Burnt Norton from The Four Quartets: “in our beginning is our end…” and the notion of linear time as an analogical construct, as a way of exploring portraiture as a mark made in time, and as a way of interpreting the world my mother now inhabits. 

Collaboration

This was my first real experience of collaboration , when working with students on cyanotypes, in which they turned themselves into signs, using their bodies as objects, from the perspective of the sun, that block the light, and cast shadows. They are reduced to empty outlines, although movement can be “captured” through the manipulation of shadows. This is another way to explore portraits as a mark made in time, with the bodies as variants on sundials. 

Themes to develop

Destructive processes

Text and image- text as image

Cyanotypes bodies

Sundials- passing time

Ideas to develop- progressively evolving images- perhaps a film or animated series.

This has been very long and dragged out, and I have become quite obsessed with a few new techniques, to the extent that I’ve had little interest in cutting wood or Lino, or in making monoprints. I think it’s the relative sophistication- or so it seems to me- that can be achieved using these techniques- the possibility of layering in so many ways, and the use of photographs, always a bit of a thought to do, as they have to be justified and defended, even with their status as “ready-mades”.

That’s all very well, but they need a press to print, and that severely reduces the chances of working and experimenting.

I have been studying other people’s prints, and despite admiring their technical expertise, have at times felt bored with them… I really liked the work of Marc Quinn though, that I saw at Art Central in Hong Kong recently, and this was what made me want to experiment with photos, as I was doing recently, using portraits of my mother, but that’s for the next assignment as it falls under the title of portraits. I’d really like to nail the process of putting photos onto photopolymer plates, but without all the gear, it’s really hard. Even though you’re  not looking for technically high standards.

http://marcquinn.com

What interested me was Marc Quinn’s etchings from photos of meat- I believe he used laser printing from photos though. I also loved his etching of the frozen wave, made by embossing.

Anyway to get back to this unit- it was called chiaroscuro, and therefore invited exploration into light and dark, black and not-black in print, with all the practical technicalities and metaphorical imagery related to that. In terms of print-making I guess the “solid black” is the holy grail. I have managed it, using copper plate etching, with aquatint created using an air-brush, and a deep etch, which can create a velvety black.

What was interesting was to use my practice plates as a mezzotint layer and smooth them back into white. Photopolymer is much harder to get blacks with. They are so delicate, and I am still working on details such as whether to expose a plate in the sun after developing, or whether to clean with vinegar, as I have had disasters with both. Climate and other variables also make a difference. I’ve now got a bee in my bonnet about this process, and although I could probably get on with something else more successfully, I won’t until I’ve got somewhere with it.

I know I haven’t resolved the images of David and Goliath, and the idea of the truth and perception gaze. I’m just stuck, and have had to move on. There’s a worthwhile idea there somewhere, but it needs more work. I am reasonably happy with the “Facets” piece though, and think there is definitely something in this sculptural approach.

My earlier prints, the Newton’s apple and hand, were getting to know the materials and processes, and were much closer to a traditional interpretation of chiaroscuro. But even here, the connection to photography was latent.

Moving on from here

I am feeling very dissatisfied with myself at this stage, and feel I need a radical rethink of my ways of working. I have been far too obsessed with thinking and not involved in enough making. Everything is in my head, and part of that is the need to conceptualise what I’m doing, which is something mostly done in words, but it’s also because of embarked on techniques for which I don’t have the materials to hand. I am going to have to step back, sketch more, make more, find ways of making substitutes. I’ve signed up for a weekend workshop in Japanese woodcut printmaking- which has a focus on the printing process itself, including preparing paper for hand burnishing. At long last I hope to get to grips with what the paper is that’s for sale here, and what it’s good for, how it can be treated etc.

One of the more fun things I did as part of this was the Cyanotype project with students- the issue there being that it’s difficult to have control over the output, while still respecting their rights to self-expression… This is something I will have another go at in the coming autumn, as I’m planning another project week on the theme of printing with light… but it depends on whether the school is going to actually get an exposure unit, which would mean we could be more ambitious. Without one, it will still be sun exposures.