MA Week 37 – ups and downs

25th July 2016: reflection on the past two weeks : ups and downs

Firstly, some good news: my paper was accepted for the “Grim Up North” symposium. Hurrah! Now the hard work begins. Actually I’m quite looking forward to it, as I think I’ll learn more about my practice and hopefully I can use at least some of the ideas in my dissertation (which I’m not quite looking forward to).

In a further “Grim up North” vein, I paid my first visit to the People’s History Museum in Manchester, specifically to see the “Grafters” exhibition of photographs of workers. I’ve written a post about this. I also paid a short visit to another part of the museum which deals with post World War 2 social history. There was quite a bit about Thatcher, the unions and the Miner’s Strike. To a certain extent it made my blood boil, re-living the deindustrialisation of the North, but I knew it would. One of the positive things I took from it was a reinforcement of my idea of today’s everyday being tomorrow’s heritage (the presence of a “Rock against Racism” badge cemented this). An enjoyable visit which I doubt will be my last, especially as their riverside café serves good food at decent prices!

I was on annual leave last week and had hoped to get into Print Room a couple of times. However, a combination of an ongoing family problem and a leaking boiler meant I only got in there once, which was a downer. I did some further monoprinting, with mixed results. I worked a little bit into the blue and yellow ones from week 33, and did some black and red ones.

On a roll : taking over the print room with my monoprints

My ideas of using shapes based on the buildings that I’d seen on the Holbeck urban wandering didn’t work brilliantly well. The shapes soon got overly inky and this produced messy prints. I think really I was straying into the realms of screen printing or lino cutting. I also tried really hard with my registration technique. It’s better but still needs a lot of work.

I did a drawn monoprint in red into a couple of the blue and yellow ones and that worked OK. I need to think a little more about the positioning of the drawing in relation to the original shapes, though. The most successful pieces came from using some old combs to scratch into the ink and then layering these up in different colours. This gave lots of interesting texture and variations in colour.  I liked these pieces and could see them developing into part of a bigger piece. I also paid more attention to inking the plate. I rolled the ink out onto the work surface then inked the plate, rather than rolling the ink directly onto the plate. This allowed me to get a smoother inking. Still work to do, but getting better!

Monoprint plus acetate

Stuck at home, I experimented a little with collaging acetate pieces of some of the Holbeck photos onto a couple of the prints. These worked OK and I can work into them again. I also etched another drypoint plate but won’t get the chance to print it until this coming Friday. Aaagh!!