Printmaking and the Cinematic Gesture
Abstract
Norsk:
Prosjektet Printmaking and the Cinematic Gesture innkapslet en viktig periode med utvikling og arbeid, og førte til et stort antall forskningsresultater. Som et utgangspunkt var jeg i stand til å delta på 9-10 uker med et trykkeriopphold ved Frans Masereel Centrum fra januar 2023, hvor jeg ikke bare fikk full tilgang til et utstyrt grafikkstudio, men også personlig og gruppeinstruksjon om trykking. teknikker. Jeg har en utskriftsgrad fra min BA, og så denne gjeninnføringen av ferdigheter var en fantastisk måte å oppdatere kunnskapen min på teknikker som monotypi, etsing, silketrykk, offset litografi og tresnitt og steinlitografi. Jeg deltok på mange dager med praktiske workshops om alle disse teknikkene, i tillegg til å lære å bruke en laserskjærer, en Epson-skriver og en ny UV-skriver. Disse ferdighetene har blitt brakt som lærer til KHIO ved å introdusere grafikkkurs i læreplanen min, hvorav den første ble holdt vårsemesteret 2024, i tillegg til å vise elevene i Color Lab noen av de mulige håndteknikkene. Fra denne arbeidsperioden utviklet jeg nye verk, som har gått ned to nye veier i min praksis.
Mitt eget arbeid har blitt endret og utviklet av dette prosjektet. Spesielt utviklet jeg et nytt arbeid som ble stilt ut på CONTOUR-biennalen høsten 2023 (og igjen på en separatutstilling i Tyskland tidlig i 2024). Denne samlingen av arbeid utviklet seg fra fotografier tatt av modernistiske kunstners studioer som deretter ble forlatt i løpet av flere år etter bygging under andre verdenskrig. Denne forskningen ble utviklet til fulle arbeider som jeg produserte og eksperimenterte med i løpet av denne oppholdsperioden, og deretter brakt inn i studio for å fullføre. Verkene ble vist med en lysinstallasjon, da jeg deltok med mine malerier i en filmbiennale. Verkene ble skrevet om i det nye belgiske kunstmagasinet GLEAN.
Samtidig med utviklingen av dette arbeidet, førte den store mengden eksperimentering og nye teknikker som jeg var i stand til å praktisere på residency til flere utstillinger av en annen ny kropp, der jeg bruker monotypiteknikker, Epson-trykk og andre eksperimentelle former for avtrykk, og disse ble stilt ut på Kunsthal Oslo i en separatutstilling høsten 2023, samt en gruppeutstilling på MUHKA, Antwerpen.
I tillegg ble tiden min på residensen, og i månedene etter, brukt på å samle og redigere en bok som inkluderte ti års skriving og de siste fem årene med arbeider. Vital Signs: Writings on Gesture ble co-publisert av Frans Masereel Centrum og av Occasional Papers, og det å kunne jobbe og eksperimentere samt behandle, redigere og faktisk layoute boken om residency var enormt nyttig, inkludert redaksjonsmøter. Når denne boken ble utgitt, ble den først lansert på Kunsthall Oslo, deretter på en rekke arenaer, og den fortsetter å bli lansert i 2024. Jeg arrangerte også et residency og et symposium rundt spørsmålet om kunstnernes stemme ved Frans Masereel Centrum.
Dette førte til et pågående samarbeid med en motedesigner Sabrina Seifred som vi har laget og stilt ut sammen basert på overlevelsesvester.
English:
The project Printmaking and the Cinematic Gesture encapsulated an important period of development and working, and led to a large number of research results. As a starting point, I was able to attend 9-10 weeks of a printmaking residency at the Frans Masereel Centrum beginning in January 2023, where I was given not only full access to an equipped printmaking studio, but also personal and group instruction on printmaking techniques. I have a printmaking degree from my BA, and so this re-introduction to skills was a wonderful way of updating my knowledge on techniques such as monotype, etching, silkscreen, off-set lithography and woodcut and stone lithography. I attended many days of practical workshops on all these techniques, as well as learning how to use a laser cutter, an Epson printer, and a new UV printer. These skills have been brought as a teacher to KHIO by introducing printmaking courses into my curriculum, the first of which was held in spring term 2024, as well as showing students in the Color Lab some of the hand-techniques possible. From this period of working I developed new bodies of works, which have gone down two new avenues in my practice.
My own work has been changed and developed by this project. Specifically, I developed a new body of work which was exhibited at CONTOUR Biennial in Autumn 2023 (and again at a solo show in Germany in early 2024). This body of work developed from photographs taken of modernist artists studios which were then abandoned within years of construction during WWII. This research was developed into full works that I produced and experimented with during this residency period, and then brought into the studio to finish. The works were shown with a lighting installation, as I participated with my paintings in a film biennial. The works were written about in the new Belgium art magazine GLEAN.
Concurrent to developing this body of work, the large amount of experimentation and new techniques that I was able to practice on the residency led to multiple exhibitions of another new body of work, in which I use monotype techniques, Epson printing and other experimental forms of imprint, and these were exhibited at Kunsthal Oslo in a solo exhibition in Autumn 2023, as well as a group exhibition at MUHKA, Antwerp.
Additionally, my time on the residency, and in the months following, was spent on gathering and editing a book which included ten years of writing, and the past five years of works. Vital Signs: Writings on Gesture was co-published by Frans Masereel Centrum and by Occasional Papers, and being able to work and experiment as well as process, edit and in fact layout the book on my residency was hugely helpful, including editorial meetings. This book when published, was launched first at Kunsthall Oslo, then at a number of venues, and it continues to be launched in 2024. I also organized a residency and symposium around the question of artists voice at the Frans Masereel Centrum.
This led to an ongoing collaboration with a fashion designer artist Sabrina Seifred whom we have been making and exhibiting works together based on survival vests.
Description
A new understanding of how imprint can be used in painting as a tool and technique that both connotates a cinematic movement, but also of an imprint of the maker. How this can be used as an emotional means to deal with contemporary topics such as displacement, as imprint acts as a stain within work, and can adjust the way image making is produced (away from a photographic reproduction and towards a reproduction of a feeling that something has been touched or left behind). This adds to a dialogue on the ‘informe’ of Rosalind Krauss and Yve Alain Bois and I am thinking intentionally about how painting can be a ‘thinking medium’ through process, but unlike how a formless gesture is spoken about by Bois and Krauss as a surface that reveals an adjustment of material by a process, I am thinking of imprint as a tool that points to process as well as a construction of motif. Im doing this both with paint and silkscreen and monotype.
Knowledge on the skills of printmaking techniques that can be applied across mediums, both in my own work and as a teacher. Specifically that breaking the ‘technique’ of printmaking by using layered and multiple mediums, both as an artist and a teacher, pushes work into realms of slower readings through denser surfaces, and seeing how this is used in a lot of painting history (painting history using collage, print, and experimental mediums to build surfaces). This has become embedded in my teaching techniques, to work with students to return to and add to and keep working on their own and others works as integral to my courses.
The role of voice in many practices that is not singular, as spoken about in the symposium ‘The Artists Voice’, comes from an interest in ‘giving platform’ or ‘giving voice’ within a artistic practice, and as a contemporary feminist thinker, I am deeply interested in the power dynamics that accompany authorship. In the book Vital Signs that I published, the big discovery was that my writing, and my practice, is multi-vocal, and that embracing this multi-vocal quality is the future of my work, and something that many others are dealing with. One writer Natasha Soobramanien at the symposium wrote about how, in her collaborative writing practice with the white writer Luke Williams, they search for and want to give voice to people’s whose voices are silenced, and that the ethics of that is complicated. I realized that I am very interested not in ‘collaboration’ per se, but in artistic practices that refuse to root themselves in a singular voice in order to make space for others to inhabit, and that this is not a simple gesture of giving, or of collaboration, but of independently creating something that others can inhabit.
In my collected writing, I have discovered a space to write about survival strategies as an artist, which is a political decision to write as a critical position to the changing art world around me. Also in the process of making the book, I understood and discovered how the back-and-forth nature of combining writing with painting alongside each other, but not TO each other directly, creates a form of both writing and painting that enacts the multi-vocal, uncentered quality of authorship that I am searching for.