MA Week 27 - pylons and printing

Reflection on the past few days – 13^th May 2016

 

The week unexpectedly turned out really positive. I managed to get into the print room for an hour after work on Tuesday and pulled the first prints from the pylon plate. OK, it’s not the best drypoint ever, but it is certainly the best one I’ve done and the marks really worked for me. The blackness is good quality. I felt really happy when I peeled the first print off the plate. It’s visually communicating what I want to communicate. It’s also the first one I’ve done with the new etching needles and it was great to get off to such a good start with them.

 

Pylon print one

Today (Friday) I went back into the print room and worked into the plate a little bit more, to add a bit more detail. I then decided to try printing it in red. This linked back to the writing in red ink that I did last weekend, and this question of whether the red marks might be really black marks but in a different colour. I experimented a bit with double-printing, too. My conclusion is that the black works better. The red seems too light for the fairly light weight of the lines. The red isn’t really saying what’s inside me, either. So back to black, for now at least.

Pylon : red

Pylon : double print, red and black

 

Then I had a really insightful tutorial with my personal tutor, Sharon. I had become quite aware that my subject matter seemed to be hopping around a bit (buildings, cranes, pylons…) and wasn’t sure why this was, nor whether this necessitated further theoretical perpectives. After discussion I concluded that I am inspired by the industrial landscape (as opposed to the natural landscape) and these items are all part of that landscape. We also discussed the fact that I’ve taken photos of factories, pylons etc whilst on a journey, in those cases a car journey, but that this is not all that different to the Armley generative wandering. It is a response to interesting things whilst on the move. 

This may bring in theories of place. I’d looked briefly at phenomenology during the week and wondered if this might be the theory I needed – exploring lived experience?? But the discussion turned to the fact that we are shoehorning visual practice into theories used for other subjects, other areas of enquiry. I suggested we need theories of our own as creative practitioners. Quite what my theory would be, I’m not sure, but it would be something about black mark-making.

Sharon also challenged me to think about working with other people’s histories. Could I do this? I don’t know. What if their marks weren’t black? Should I be thinking about written and/or oral histories? Diaries? Soooo very much to think about.  

Sharon also encouraged me to continue to write reflections, whether on post-its or whatever, so that I don’t lose the sense of the moment and place and time of creating whatever I’m doing. So I’ve come home and started immediate blogging!

 

The advent of the pylons - time, place, lunch!

I took some photos of pylons on another car journey. This car was being driven by an old school friend, Fran, and contained another old school friend, Clare, in the back. Fran is a musician, amongst other talents, and we’d been discussing the creative process whilst en route to Clare’s house. I was telling her about drawing industrial infrastructure and that I fancied creating some work about pylons. So she encouraged me to photograph any pylons I saw. There was a monster one at the motorway junction for Clare’s place and this is the one featured above. Our destination was lunch with another old school friend, Moira. By the time we met up with Moira the other two had also become pylon spotters and were pointing out particularly picturesque pylons on the return journey. A creative by product of a lovely lunchtime!