MA Week 69 - Pressing on with printmaking and Frances Morris talk

Reflection on the past week, 23rd May 2017

Pressing on with printmaking and Frances Morris talk

Developing the drypoint

I’ve developed my drypoint following the circles I etched with the dividers last week. As well as the dividers, I'd bought a circle stencil which proved ideal for drawing the circular shapes both on paper and ultimately on the plate. I sketched out a series of shapes from the mini-dérive, working to relate the shapes to each other and to balance the sketch with a variety of shapes and sizes. I also experimented with textures and shading, and was quite pleased with the result. I then flip-photocopied it and drypoint etched it into Perspex.  As always I found curved shapes difficult to draw - seems the trick is to move the plate rather than the needle.  The idea of this is to form an underneath layer of a two or three layer drypoint of the walk. It gave a reasonable result but I will probably work further into it to try to get a bit more variation in depth, following on from last week’s results. I printed it in blue (process cyan) as I wanted to take one of the colours of the walk, namely that of the railings outside the former Burley Library.

 

The shapes of the overlooked urban environment

Yesterday I went out at lunchtime and did a couple of very quick sketches which might act as a “top layer” to this plate. I’d drawn outdoors previously but taken quite a bit of time over each sketch. These were done quickly, and I was amazed at the amount of visual information you can get down within 5 minutes.

 

Houses; visual note
 

More soft ground troubles.

Following on from last week's experiment, I tried again with pressing plant materials into a soft ground. Last week I used an old plate that I'd acquired and stripped back. This week I used a similar plate plus a brand new one. I sanded them both back equally and cleaned them to within an inch of their life following my hunch of last week. However... still no joy. The ground still came away. So it isn't the plate, given I’d used an old and a new one, and it can’t be the cleaning either. It must be something to do with the preparation and/or the etching. More investigations needed.

 

“Troubling Time” conference paper

I've started to write the paper for the "Troubling Time" conference in Manchester on 1st June. I am going to introduce my research and my practice, then invite the participants to produce a visual work which "troubles time". This is based on the organisers' encouragement of contributions which “engage practically with their duration, with the aim of fostering methodological diversity”. I don’t know if people will engage with it, and it’s already pushing me out of my comfort zone, but that’s probably a good thing.

On a related note, I've just heard that the walking event scheduled for 1st June has been postponed for a couple of reasons. This is a shame but it does mean that I will be able to attend the whole day at the conference which will be good.

Frances Morris talk

Finally I went to an excellent talk by Frances Morris, director of Tate Modern, last night. She is a very engaging, interesting speaker and I learnt a lot about "behind the scenes at museums" from her Talk. I've summarised the points most salient to my own practice in this blogpage.