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Artist book

Artist book

Cover and page images produced for an artist book part of the Advanced printmaking course at City lit in 2020/2021. The cover is perspex and was baked in the oven to produce bubbles. The binding is plastic tubing mimicking the tubing from a spacesuit.

The book is a combination of a number of different print techniques. The cover is a photo litho image. Within the book there are silkscreen prints, cyanotypes, etched lino prints overprinted with wooden type. The quotes are printed on a gel plate.

The book is Inspired by a novel, Solaris written by Stanislaw Lem and the 1972 Russian film directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. The story is about a psychologist Kris Kelvin, who arrives at a space station to investigate what is happening to a group of scientists who are conducting scientific experiments using radiation, on the planet Solaris. The crew are being haunted by hallucinations or apparations from their former lives and imagination.

“Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed.”

From Solaris by Stanislaw Lem

Shortly after Kris arrives on the space station he begins to have visitations and sees a copy of his wife Rheya. Rheya had previously committed suicide after Kris had left her. Kris believes at first that he is dreaming but after the other crew members can aslo see his wife he realises she is actually there.

I was particularly interested in this story as it’s a continuation on a theme I started to work on last year about memory and hallucination. Do we ever lose people close to us when they pass away or are they always with us embedded in our consciousness?

An object, place, moment in time, a fragment of music or bird call can bring back a memory or thought about the person who isn’t with us anymore. The person need not be dead for a sensory stimulation to create a visitation of their being in our minds. It’s a yearning to be with the loved person, to hear them speak to touch them and share a joke with them again. 

“We’re not searching for anything except people. We don’t need other worlds. We need mirrors.”


From Solaris by Stanislaw Lem

Dreamscape

Dreamscape

Dreamscape split screen video

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.

Daydream text

Daydream text

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.”

Alex’s response to my daydream text:

Horniman Park  20/6/2020

Green, white, blue

Shifting, cloud grey

Above earth, below sky,

Gong sound reverberates

Sound waves, beginning again,

Warm rays, yellow light,

Peace, happy, birds chatter,

Boy bird, white balloons,

Child wonder, investigates.

Behind dad, orange shorts

Masked man, tiny dog

Barefoot play,

Oak tree thoughts,

Thousand year song

Prepare the ground with your hopes

And I’m feeling good.

Personal project

Personal project

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.
Washing prints in water after exposure.
Stop motion animation

Stop motion animation

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.

Cyanotypes

Cyanotypes

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.