This week, a very busy week. I met more students in the print room, a student on the MA studying fine art, Alexander, came in worked and had a chat. And perhaps strangely, about The Wacky Races, strange in that when you think about things from the past they often seem a long way back and in the interim no thought or sign of those things were evident. But now with You Tube keeping it current, what will memory be in the future? Strange thought perhaps, but if technology keeps things present to an extent that those things and moments never really disappear from view, how would that be? Will term memory not mean the same thing as I had thought it was. Hmmm . . . Not sure that this is going anywhere; but having done a project called Snapshots, using old family photographs where memory research revealed that memory is about a process of decline, decay and selection, there is a bit of intrigue there. Ah that’s it, I was surprised to hear Wacky Races on his phone after all that time, will we have an ever-present, present in our future technological age and the past would not entirely surprise us? Anyway enough pondering on that. may have been reading too much Virilio theory.
Some other students came in and worked, graphics students and I chatted with them too. Another graphics student came in later and we looked over each other’s progress after a while. Jane Watt who is heading the fine art, came in to see how I was getting on. We talked about Barthes and his explanations around the simulacrum, a copy without a ‘guaranteed referent in the world’, and how my first print runs had a particular physical referent to the world. The first two images are images of the things that produced the material to create the image. The image made by the thing depicted. The scissors cut the paper strips that were used as a mask to create the image (seen from under the screen) and the hole punch created the paper dots which were distributed to make the image. Neither of the images refer or associate outside of their physicality or signification. There was no original as such so it is not a copy and whatever pre-existed the final printed image is destroyed in the process of making the print run, so from that point of view it no longer has a referent to the world that preceded it.
We discussed the third piece, which I will post up later as I need to stop pretty soon, but before I finish the post; she said the scissor colour reminded here of cyanotype. Now that’s got me thinking, I have done cyanotype work before in a couple of projects actually, but I had not thought about a connection. Cyanotype obviously relates to photography, but also to printmaking I am now thinking. Both share a masking process in the making of images. The screen printing that I have been doing so far has been stencil rather than photo-screen and they both ‘trace’ the thing that creates the image. I think I could integrate the two methods, perhaps, but not sure how. These first two print runs follow on from and develop a project called Tracing the Everyday from some while back. Here is a link to the blog I made following on from the ideas emerging during my MA. www.a-n.co.uk/blogs/un-fiction-snapshots-etc
I am not sure that the connection would have occurred to me without Jane’s visit, so that was a good coincidence. Another coincidence is that I have been asked to take on delivering a printmaking course at the Ipswich Institute next term. So that’s two courses to teach now, that’s good as I miss the teaching.
That’s it for now.
