Along with my performance projects I have also been working on Printing. Screen printing and etching. The project started through a task set by university. We as a group were tasked in making a book of prints. The group decided to make prints based on literature.
Dystopian Literature/media
As an artist was interested in dystopian media. My first point of call was A Clock Work Orange. I read the book then watched the film. Burgess tells us what a Clock Work Orange is;
‘Clock work orange – by definition, a human being is endowed with free will. He can use this to choose between good and evil. If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange—meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice, but is in fact only a clockwork toy wound up by God or the Devil or (since this is increasingly replacing both) the Almighty State.’
Admittedly I found it hard to make Print work that wasn’t illustrating a book, this wasn’t my aim. I decided to look further from A Clock Work Orange. I watched ‘Metropolis’ the Fritz Lang 1920’s sci-fi movie it was hugely influential, I was interested in the performativity element of the film, it did influence some of my performance work. For the print project though
I found interest in the Architectural element and the theme of ‘As above. So bellow’ symbolism, for me Lang actually re images the seal of Solomon. This in turn influenced me to produce my own symbols.
Etching
I attempted some etching more lately, I took influence from an image (taken by Emma Starkey, www.emmastarkey.com) that has been influential in other works this semester but I will talk about them later on. I used the image and distorted it by continuous photocopying so I ended up with a pixelated image; from this I used the outlines of the cloths. I was interested in the manner in which homeless people just become objects and how they can also disappear into the back ground but no matter what they always leave their mark, using the etching I made prints, ghost prints until the prints became just embossed paper.
