MA Week 50 - a fantastic drypoint demo and the end of the dissertation

Reflection on the past week, 6^th December 2016

Urban printing

Something visual at last, after what feels like years but really is “only” about six weeks of writing. I went to a “Printmaker’s Toolkit” one-hour session by Cath Brookes at the West Yorkshire Print workshop, entitled “Printmaking in the Urban Landscape” – so obviously right up my street.

Cath is inspired by the industrial and has done a lot of work around Redcar, around the chemical plants and the now-closed steelworks (see Cath’s website). She sketches outdoors and then works from the sketches. She brought one of her sketchbooks and there were some lovely thick black lines in there (possibly conte sticks?). She demonstrated the printing of a thin acetate plate which she’d etched previously, first inking it in black then selectively wiping it, rolling ink back onto it, and re-wiping it. This gave a very industrial feel to the outcome.

Cath with the first print

 

She then inked and selectively wiped a second plate with a blend of orange and blue inks and printed this on top of the first print. The technique was fairly simple (though obviously Cath has finessed it over time) but gave such an impressive outcome, with a toxic orange in the sky and pools of water in the foreground. Finally, she demonstrated a chine collé, using some Chinese Paper onto which she had previously printed textures. This transparent paper blended into the overall image and gave fantastic texture.

 

The first print overprinted with a selectively coloured plate - super industrial!

Cath managed to gallop through all of this in an hour, but I took nearly all of it in as I have spent the past year working with the same techniques and subject matter. There were two really interesting points. Firstly, the use of thin, transparent plates. These allow you to trace an image using a Sharpie marker prior to etching it, and they also assist with the selective inking of the monoprint stage. Secondly, Cath is working the opposite way round to the way I did it, as I’d done the monoprint layer first. I’ve bought some of the transparent acetate with a view to having a go with Cath’s technique as soon as possible.

The dissertation is done

The dissertation is now finished, printed and in for binding. I’ve also finally managed to publish a few notes about Ann-Marie Bathmaker’s seminal book chapter on Life Histories. The dissertation took some beating into submission over the past weekend. Thursday went well; I took Sharon’s advice of last week (see my week 49 blogpost) and restructured the discussion about the chosen artists along the lines she’d suggested. This seemed to open up the essay and somehow remove other blockages. It was a long but successful day. On Friday I went into College and sorted out all the images, which took about 5 hours, then came home for an evening shift tidying up the bibliography and various other loose ends. So far so good. Saturday and Sunday were not so good. I knew I had to cut it off and tidy it up, but I was tired and I’ve read and written the damned thing so many times that I could recite it off by heart so I’ve no idea if what I’m reading is on the screen or in some previous version. The conclusion, in particular, proved much more difficult to write than I expected. I can only go back to the fact that this is my first piece of writing of this style.

Anyway, what’s done is done, all 130 hours of it. It has been a steep learning curve, frustrating at times, but for the most part enjoyable. I feel I have risen to the academic challenge and could have written more with more words and more time. I’m going to keep some of the psychogeography books out of the Library over Christmas in the hope of being able to read a bit of them. However my desire to do something visual has been absolutely fuelled by this morning’s demo. Although I haven’t given much thought to what I’ll do for the Final Project, I know it will have industrial-style black lines in it. Watch this space.

MA Week 50 - Bathmaker : Life history and identity

Bathmaker : Life history and identity 

In the introduction to the book which she edits with Penelope Hartnett, Anne-Marie Bathmaker sets out some arguments in favour of the individual telling their story of their life-as-lived and highlighting how it conflicts with the over-arching narratives of our time. This book chapter has been enlightening and inspiring to me since I first read it six or seven months ago. Below is my short analysis of the chapter. 

Bathmaker articulates the idea of the “life history” as being the “life story” of a person set within the social and historical context in which it took or is taking place (p2). The use of narrative enquiry within life history research documents the “complexities and contradictions” of real life. The ambiguity is revealed and the homogeneous result that a large sample size may produce is disturbed. Such enquiry “may call into question dominant narratives that do not match the experience of life as lived” (p3). This in turn may “speak truth to power” (p5).  

Life history research is also important, argues Bathmaker, because the previous trajectories for life (class, gender, race) no longer hold true – for better or for worse. (p3). If you tell your story, you can articulate and recognise your identity. Individual agency is restored and there is a move away from “big narratives” such as Marxism and feminism. However, the big narratives still impinge on an individual’s daily life. Understanding an individual’s story in the context of particular social structures gives a deeper illumination of both their story and the social structures.

For me this is very important reading as my own practice has grown from what I’ve called my “lived experience”, which tallies very closely with Bathmaker’s description of the “life history”. Bathmaker’s discussion illuminates further for me the manipulation and repurposing of history that we encounter passively every day, whether by government, media, teachers or multiple other agencies. From whose viewpoint do we really recount history? Media/journalists? Individual historians? Why are some voices more valid than others? The “life history” concept seems to me to allow more validity of the individual’s voice than simply “history”. It disrupts my tenet of the "official".

Another thought that arises is that individual identity is complex and cannot be defined by one theoretical perspective. The big narratives can easily become oppressive. For example, there are some areas of feminism and socialism with which I strongly agree, but I don’t agree with everything that each of these metanarratives stand for. It is easy to pigeon-hole individuals on the basis of a part-identification with a particular metanarrative, but just because it’s easy, it’s not necessarily correct or justifiable.