Brigitta Summers

Brigitta Summers is an emerging artist and writer living and working on Gadigal and Wangal land in Sydney. She has recently completed a Master of Fine Arts at Sydney College of the Arts. Her research investigated ‘thinking with trees’ through artistic practice, primarily large-scale woodcut and site-based bookmaking as a way of transforming her relationship to the environment. Previously she has completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Printmaking) at the National Art School, Sydney, and a Bachelor of Arts (History and German) at Oxford University, UK.

Tell us about your creative process. What drives your practice?

My practice is really driven by finding a topic that interests me and then pursuing that through a printmaker-ly lens. I studied History and German before I studied art, and that has influenced my understanding of the role printmaking can play within the broader cultural and political context. I think print is a fantastically versatile medium that can address a lot of different issues in interesting ways, and I love working out how to make it speak to the things that interest me in particular. Often this comes through thinking about process, materials, or the historical ways that print has operated. My BFA grad show work was about witchcraft in the 16th and 17th centuries and engaged with woodcut to connect with the processes through which witchcraft was constructed as a cultural phenomenon at the time. More recently, I have become interested in the ways that images influence our relationship to the environment, and so I am thinking about that in relation to print technology, such as the halftone screen and CMYK print processes. 

Within the lens of climate crisis, how do you navigate your relationship to the environment and what is the role of trees as a model for new ways of relating?

One of the confronting things about being interested in the wellbeing of plants is realising that your life is entirely dependent on them, that there is no way to avoid harming plants if you want to keep living. Because we rely on them so heavily within the context of capitalism, many plant lives are instrumentalised for our use, including the materials used in my art practice, such as plywood which I use as the blocks for my woodcuts. There is no easy way out of this ethical conundrum, however one of the things that acknowledging our reliance on plants can do is help us to realise our fundamental interconnectedness with the world – that even using industrialised plant materials is a kind of living with plants. In this sense, trees act as a model for new ways of relating because their existence is obviously inextricable from this interconnectedness. The fact they are sessile (meaning they can’t move around) means they are completely dependent on opening themselves up to the world around them to maintain their lives. So my goal in my Masters was to try and learn from trees to recuperate the relationship I have with these industrialised, instrumentalised plants by opening myself up to being changed by working with them.

Your materials and matrices are intrinsically connected to your subject of nature. What is the intersection between your subject matter and your material practice?

I’m interested in what it does to your experience of looking at an image or representation of a plant, to know that plants were instrumental in bringing that image into existence. I am actually interested in pursuing this relationship more fully. For example, the woodcut series that I made for my MFA, Bleeding Heart, depicts a bleeding heart tree in my backyard. These woodcuts are flocked using crushed willow charcoal. However, I would like to explore making my own charcoal from twigs of the bleeding heart tree to use for the flocking. How would this change our experience of looking at these prints? In my recent show with a friend at Chrissie Cotter Gallery, my woodcuts depict trees and are clearly made from wood with the wood grain showing in the prints. Meanwhile, the show was called Some New Woodcuts in a direct nod to the material practice in which we were engaged. How does this affect how we read the images? There is something compelling to me in this kind of material and representational overlap, where the tree becomes present in different ways and can be read into the image on multiple levels.

 What is the significance of haptic touch in your practice?

Haptic touch emerged during my Masters as a way of engaging the audience in a comparable physical experience to my experience of carving woodblocks for woodcut, where I understand my own body as a kind of material that can be worked on by plants. Haptic touch is exploratory, seeking to create knowledge of the world through touch that opens up both the toucher and what is touched to being changed by the contact. It reminds us that we exist bodily in a world that is shared with all kinds of other life, including plants, and in doing so places an ethical demand for care on us. I explore this in my practice through the process of casting and artist bookmaking. Artist books are best experienced when they are able to be handled by the audience, so my aim was to create works that stimulate an awareness of your body, demanding a particular way of holding yourself in relation to the work and in turn to the tree they depict. I hope to evoke feelings of care for plants in the viewer through my work by appealing to this shared world of touch.

 Are there any female printmakers | artists that influence you?

There are a few different female artists who work in print whose practices really inspire me. I love the work of Ciara Phillips because it is very playful technically, incorporating different ways of working in a single image but is also really politically engaged. She is such a printmaker, but her work is also very contemporary and conceptual. I think her work really brings out the inherent conceptuality of print by thinking about how it operates, both as an image-making technology and as a tool of political engagement. In a similar way, Andrea Buettner is a really conceptual artist, whose work in print engages with the history of art but makes it feel contemporary, and whose concerns are broad ranging and also often political. Both Phillips and Buettner bring print off the paper and onto the walls and into the space of the gallery. Finally, the work of Christiane Baumgartner really inspired the woodcuts I made for my Masters work, both conceptually and aesthetically.

Finally, what exciting projects are you working on at the moment?

I have a solo show at AIRspace Projects in Marrickville in June for which I am attempting to make a four colour CMYK screenprint on four layers of Perspex (one colour to each piece of Perspex) using hand drawn separations. I’m curious to see if I can make an unstable image, one which requires the same kind of bodily negotiation in space as the artist books do, that makes the viewer aware of looking in a bodily way. I have no idea if it’s going to work or not, there’s definitely still a lot of experimentation needed, just from a technical perspective, not to mention the aesthetic and conceptual side. There’re also other kinds of material experimentation I’d like to do to push what I was doing with the artist books in my Masters. I’m really interested in the idea of impression or imprint, and the relationship that establishes between casting processes and print (which of course already have a historical relationship through casting type, etc.), and how that brings print into sculpture. As always, there are too many ideas and not enough time!