A Sense of Place – a collaborative print project

Having been away for a bit I am suddenly rethinking the whole raft of meanings that can be associated with the words “A Sense of Place”

I have begun to rethink meanings & interpretations and attempting to get back to a core understanding. I am also continuing with my wood & lino cuts resulting from watching the war in Gaza unfold through the media. As the worlds press has moved on my imagery is also moving from the specific to a more universal position.

HP

Thinking more about Sue's theme of the panoptic eye, and conversations with Nichola about surveillance and data bases.. p

I like this image, a friend of mine took the photo and i've combined it with some of my own images and some text that probably can't be read. I like the way he looks quite wild it reminds me of something i read in a book that went…

"We ourselves are genetically wild rather than domesticated…we are also tame…conditioned to accept the human environment…We are wild but tamed by television, controlled by captain clock, hemmed in by routine and obediance to petty convention…you see it in the streak of sheer wild sanity in the eyes of the supposedly mad"

I agree with this idea that enclosing people is going to drive them mad and like the thought that the people we call mad are actually the sane ones :-)

I've used the Gum Arabic transfer technique on this again, layering up the images to give an overall subtle effect. I like the results though am a little unsatisfied, i think i am missing the fun of etching and the texture it creates that you just don't get with paper lithography. N

It interests me that some of you are looking at surveillance, thinking about land and it's history has made me think about the way it's been divided up and claimed and the restrictions that have been put on peoples movement through the land. Also the way people behave differently when they are in open countryside with no restrictions, which is hard to find in Britain these days, compared to being surrounded by walls, fences and cctv cameras.

There are up to 4.2m CCTV cameras in Britain, more than anywhere else in the world i think. This is a bit of a tangent but people's civil liberties have increasingly become a concern of mine recently.

This print is a Gum arabic print again and was inspired by information i read about children being fingerprinted in school without the parents permission, the text is a list of facts and figures about this…

in 2007 it is estimated that 3,500 schools throughout britain have been fingerprinting children without the knowledge or consent of their parents…

more than 51000 innocent children have had DNA samples lodged on a national police database.

Why? it seems worrying to me. N

As the majority of my recent research has been photographic based, i've been experimenting with printing from photographs and have discovered the Gum Arabic transfer technique, which is essentially lithography on paper and translates as printing from a photocopy. It's very quick which i like and has given some very interesting results.

I've found after photocopying the image, and then printing from it the image loses a lot of detail and becomes much more extreme in contrast. N