Monoprints produced in David Holah’s class at City Lit. Not thinking too much about colours or placement of stencils, being intuitive and just seeing which colours go together. I am drawn again and again to pink, lime green and turquoise.
I really liked this technique, the pink and grey prints were made by rolling up an acetate plate with coloured oil based inks. These colours were then distrupted with paraffin and oil to create a textured background. Sections of prints and textured wall paper ripped or cut and placed face up on top of the plate. This was then put through the press and printed. The oil based ink from the ripped fragments is slow to dry and is offset onto the clean sheet of paper when printed.
An expressive book in response to Sue Baker Kenton’s first project as part of a Year in Print at City Lit. How I feel when I hear the word print or printmaking, chaos, confusion, counterculture, collage. I think about Dave Carson’s The end of print, banners at demonstrations, photocopied flyers and posters, fanzines. The smell of the ink and the texture of the paper.
Screen printed in my garden onto collaged backgrounds created with gel plate printed shapes and lettering, tea stained tissue paper, newspaper. Pre-exposed screen from Hunt the Moon
Houses video. Models constructed from cartridge paper and printed tracing paper. Slides projected onto models from a carousel projector purchased on eBay.
Replica cardboard aeliophone constructed as part of a class with Adam Hogarth at the City Lit. An idea for creating sound for my video Houses.
An actual aeliophone wind sound machine to show how the sound works.
Dreamscape video based on David Holah’s class Do Undo Redo at City Lit. Using cyanotype prints produced at the beginning of the course, I overprinted them with mono prints. Clouds were formed from chicken wire. Prints, cut out and balanced in a kinetic sculpture, the elements suspended from the ceiling with cotton.
Found sound from my kitchen early in the morning added and edited with DaVinci Resolve. Experimenting with split screen editing after Monika Kita’s tutorial.
Responding to Paul’s text about a childhood memory:
“I remember the school I went to from the age of nine to twelve.
There was a traditional playground and a large hall. I remember standing on the stage and being in Mary Poppins. I made a huge image of St Paul’s Cathedral in charcoal and attaching it to a medical screen as a backdrop for ‘Feed the Birds’. And turned the head teacher’s lectern into a fireplace for the same play. I was also in charge of changing the lights. The switches were in a huge box on the wall with slides that took the light levels up and down.
I stayed at that school for three years. If I had never returned, I would have slight but happy memories.
However, I returned twice. The first time was to meet my old teachers. I went with some friends and said hallo and then felt a bit lost. We were too old to be there. There was nothing to do. The place already felt strange. The steps were very small. The school hall was not large at all. The lighting cupboard was a small box. The stage where we had performed Mary Poppins was not that far from the ground. I decided not to go back.
But I did go back twenty-two years later. I was working for a housing campaign. It was 1988. It was the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis and it was a period when anyone diagnosed with AIDS was almost certainly going to die. One of the most pioneering approaches to supporting people living with AIDS was being built in Lancaster Gate. The project was called the London Lighthouse and it was being built inside my old primary school. I mentioned to a colleague that I knew the building. It turned out that she was friends with one of the people leading the development, so I went along for a guided tour.”
Wood and cardboard cabinet. Birds constructed from chicken wire, newspaper, cyanotype papier mache, wire legs. Dog on wheels cyanotype papier mache, body chicken wire, wheels cardboard. Shoes, paper and papier mache. Cyanotype prints on 120gsm cartridge paper and 90gsm tracing paper. Backdrop material printed with cyanotypes of found images.
“The island is stirred up after a disappearance. People gather in little groups out in the street to talk about their memories of the thing that’s been lost. There are regrets and a certain sadness, but we try and comfort one another. If it’s a physical object that has been disappeared, we gather the remnants up to burn, or bury, or toss in the river. But no one makes much of a fuss, and it’s over in a few days. Soon enough, things are back to normal, as though nothing has happened, and no one can even recall what it was that disappeared.”
Then she would interrupt her work to lead me back behind the staircase to an old cabinet with rows of small drawers.
“Go ahead, open any one you like.”
I would think about my choice for a moment, studying the rusted oval handles.
I always hesitated, because I knew what sorts of strange and fascinating things were inside. Here in this secret place, my mother kept hidden many of the things that had been disappeared from the island in the past.”
From The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa
Backdrop drying in the garden
Coating paper with the cyanotype chemicals, Potassium Ferricyanide and Ferric Ammonium Citrate from the Jacquard kit.
Animation using Stop Motion Studio app on my phone. Creating layered images in Photoshop, with cyanotype prints, tea stained overlays, hand drawn lettering, papier mache objects.
Quote from The Falconer by Dana Czapnik. Sound recorded in Horniman park, Forest Hill. Film includes cyanotype prints, tracing paper overlays with tea staining, gel plate printing.
Animation using photographs of found objects and sound.
During lockdown, children were leaving old books and toys out for people to take. Early one morning I decided to add my bad prints to their collections. Then went on a hike around Forest Hill adding my prints for a fleeting glimpse in the local area.
Prints made from items in my recycling bin. Starting with collographs using hessian, cardboard packaging, string nets, tape and then overprinting with newspaper, lemons, cucumber and cardboard.
Print on recycle bag using washcloth, soup container, soy sauce bottle, silver foil, cardboard, lemons.
City Lit closed it’s doors on 17th March 2020. So now I’m printing at home, in the garden and in our flat. The course has continued online, so pleased it kept going, thanks to all our wonderful tutors for being innovative.
I wanted to say thank you to all the front line staff who have kept the country going and risked their lives during lockdown. Thanks to all the doctors and nurses, everyone who works for the NHS, every bus driver, tube worker, supermarket staff, dustbin men, supermarket staff, teachers, delivery drivers and everyone else who has kept the country going during the pandemic, I salute you all.
I kept out of the way and made prints and artwork, it keeps me happy and busy.
We had been taught how to make flutter books in one of the last classes at City lit and were due to deliver three versions of an artist book for the end of term.
I did a layout for the book in Indesign and then printed out sheets of acetate to expose on photo sensitive paper in the garden.
Acetate exposing on photo sensitive paper and exposed flat print.
Experimenting with exposure, this was 40 minutes. The A3 sheet was folded down to an A7 book.
Dada, nihilistic and anti aesthetic movement in the arts that flourished primarily in Zurich, Switzerland, New York City, Berlin, Hannover and Paris. Dada artists’ reliance on accident and chance were later employed by the Surrealists and Abstract Expressionists. Critics have cited Dadaist influences on the punk rock movement of the 1970’s. www.britannica.com/art/Dada
Cover of the first issue of periodical Der Dada, edited by Raoul Hausman, Berlin, 1919
From the children’s book Die Scheude (The Scarecrow) by Kurt Schwitters, Van Doesberg and Kate Steinistz, Hanover 1925Kurt Schwitters, 1923. Cover of the first issue of Merz. The original is printed black on grey paper. Images and text from Pioneers of modern typography by Herbert Spencer.
Dada poetry
Wood block printing with Sue Baker Kenton in the City Lit print room, pre lockdown.
We start on screen printing in February 2020, pre lockdown. Before printing you need to save an image in Photoshop to print out onto acetate.
To create a halftone, open up image in Photoshop, select Image>Mode>Bitmap and select Halftone screen. A window will appear offering choices of dot shape and lines per inch.
Match the resolution to whatever you set your file resolution to usually 300dpi.
For Frequency, opt for between 40 and 65 for a 90 mesh screen. The larger the dot the lower the frequency. The Angle is the angle at which the dots are positioned, 45 degrees is the default. Save as a Tiff file and print onto acetate.
Week one screen prints, single colour printing over cyanotypes.
Preparing a screen
1. Place the screen paper-side toward you. Pour the light sensitive emulsion into a coating trough. Tip the lip against the bottom and with a single stroke, pull it to the top of the screen.
2. The screen should now go into a drying cabinet away from the light. Leave to dry thoroughly.
3. Expose the image on the light unit, don’t put the image too close to the edge of the screen. String needs to be placed in the well of the screen to increase the vacuum. After exposure (5 units) wash the screen on front and back, put finger onto hose to direct the water onto the screen. This will expose the image. Put screen at the bottom of the drying cupboard to dry.
Cover the yellow edges with masking tape, tape into the corners. Build snaps out of thick cardboard and stick with some masking tape onto the edges of the wooden frame. These stop the ink from sticking to the paper.
4. Make a master copy to use as registration. Print this onto tracing paper. The printing ink should be the consistancy of single cream. The squeegee should be bigger than the image size. Flood the image with ink and then make contact with the table, the squeegee angled at 60 degrees. Make three registration marks, two at the bottom and one down the side.
Printing
Colours need to be printed from light to dark. So if printing a 4 colour print, yellow first, then magenta, next cyan and finally black.
Colour blend
Try a colour blend with two colours, mix the two colours at the bottom of the screen. The more the colours overlap, the more gradated they will appear. Flood the screen with the inks and then pull the squeegee back following the flooding lines.
Monoprinting
Work directly onto the mesh with a brush and ink. Don’t put on too much ink. Acrylic medium can be used to create negative space in the ink.
Using Posca pens
Pin a sheet of acetate on top of the printed master copy. Centralise the image under the acetate. Draw onto the acetate with lithographic pencil, Posca pen, black oil pastel, or black acrylic paint, expose acetate onto screen.
Silk screen prints, colour blend and collage background. Drawn image under halftone screen with Posca pen and lithographic crayon. Halftone screen, frequency 10 lines/inch, angle 45 degrees, shape round.
Thanks to great teaching from Adam Hogarth at City Lit, I’m just starting to get the hang of screen printing.
The course starts and our first task is to work on cyanotypes. I know already I’m going to love this.
To create artwork for a cyanotype, open an image in Photoshop. Under image choose grayscale>bitmap>300dpi. Method diffusion dither. This breaks the image up into dots. Save the file as a tiff and then under adjustments choose negative. The image then needs to be flipped horizontally so that it will print the right way round.
The chemicals needed to coat the paper are, 25grams of Ferric Ammonium Citrate, this is mixed with 100ml of water in a plastic measuring cylinder. Then mix 10 grams of Potassium Ferricyanide with 100ml of water in a separate measuring cylinder. The chemicals are then mixed together and the paper is coated, it will look yellow in colour. It is best to do this in low light conditions so that the chemicals down’t start to expose. The amount mixed will be enough to coat approximately 50 A4 sheets of paper.
The paper needs to dry in a dark place, or use a hair dryer. After the sheets are dry they can then be exposed with the acetate face down on the paper in the exposure unit for approximately 10 minutes at 75 units. I was to experiment with exposure times at home in sunlight during lockdown but that comes later.
An early cyanotype of my mum.
Abstract images can be made from coating an acetate with printing ink, then rubbing some off with a rag and adding drops of oil and paraffin. Thanks to Gareth Berwyn in the City Lit print room for those ideas.
There are a multitude of ideas to be explored with cyanotypes. I begin to create images in Photoshop using layers and my found images.
Overlaying acetates on each other, the images started to become surreal.
I had signed up to do the advanced class in printmaking with digital content at City Lit lead by course leader Rolina Blok.
Needing to find what theme I was going to work on I found inspiration in a photograph of my mother standing at the kitchen sink in the 1950’s.
It seems to be a quintessential image of a woman’s role in the 1950’s and sparked my imagination. How could I use this image of my mother in my work?
An early photo etching taken from the photograph.
It’s already abstract, it appears I need to distance myself somehow to make my work.
I visited a flea market in Paris in December 2019. Somehow I’d found out there was a stall there selling old photographs. At first I’d felt uneasy using found images of unknown people but some friends who run a cafe and gallery down the road told me they often bought photographs like this from boot sales.
I bought some amazing images to use.
So many questions about these images, who are these people, how did their photographs end up in a flea market, didn’t their families want them anymore?
I’m fascinated by them, my choice of image seemed to be mostly of women.
I started to visit some car boot sales in London and found some gems. These images are taken from a photo album I found in Pimlico, they look like they come from the 1920’s.
