You have questions, we have answers (kinda)

Every month More Than Reproduction asks a woman–artist–printmaker a series of questions about their practice spanning across who they are, what they do, when and where they do it, and how they do it. As we mark our fifth birthday, we thought it timely to reflect on the ontology of printmaking – what ‘it’ is and why we do it. This is by no means an encyclopaedic response, but merely musings informed by our personal experiences.  

Firstly, we think it’s fair to say that it can be difficult to define exactly what printmaking is. It has an amorphous, sometimes contradictory nature, often avoiding taxonomy, offering many possible permutations and dualities. What we do know is that print could be considered both a noun and a verb. It is malleable, multifarious, unexpected, and hybrid – oscillating between the analogue/low-fi and the digital/mechanical. It straddles an ambiguous registration line, existing in-between the in-between. Permeated by porosity, there is an undulation between being receptive to the new and protective of the old, where there is an innate impetus to maintain and acknowledge print’s specificity and process-driven nature, and also be transformative in order to position in a larger contemporary discourse. As a result, the last 25-years have seen the medium bend and morph to encapsulate new technologies and new approaches to the field, embracing a cross-pollination of disciplines and the blurring of techniques and mediums. However, due to its rules and insularities, there is a perpetuating marginalisation and scepticism surrounding printmaking in contemporary art, often attributed to disabling the medium from expanding and its validity. Just a thought, but perhaps the medium wouldn’t be ‘held back’ if there was more time printing and less time justifying why we do it.

Printmaking could be considered a way of being/thinking/seeing/doing, not exclusively in the print workshop, but throughout the course of our lives. It could even be equated to an intimate relationship – push and pull – where it can be both rewarding and taxing at times; gratifying and petty. It could be more accurately likened to a ‘situationship’ – exhilarating, unintentional, emotionally confusing, with blurred edges and no pre-set conditions, sometimes with a one-sidedness and lack of compromise. It often requires a deferral of agency, whereby printing trades in reversal and inversion, demanding a form of ‘backwardness’ or openness to reversibility. 

When we ask ourselves the question, who does printmaking, it is a little tricky to quantify. Technically, we are all printmakers, often leaving imprints, marks, and traces on surfaces and substrates every day. In fact, most of you may have had a brief encounter or two with it, perhaps involving a slight injury…recalling our own memories of rogue lino tools in school and the scars (or imprints) that remain on our hands today. There are a few die-hard followers (like us) who really take the chance to get to know the medium, dedicate the time and have a strong sense of loyalty to printmaking as an artistic practice. That’s not to say that the loyalty isn’t tested or prone to wane, especially during a rough day in the workshop. Printmaking is inherently community-orientated, where collectives and peer networks often emerge and grow, like More Than Reproduction for example.

When reflecting on when printmaking happens, that is also a bit complicated to answer – it’s like asking ‘when does this become that’? As aforementioned, print in the everyday can be both ubiquitous and obscure, with its presence often not recognised and hidden in plain sight – think posters, advertising, packaging, t-shirts, or the ring mark from your coffee cup on your table, or even the stain of said coffee on your shirt as you rush to drink it as you run out the door. So, a potential answer could be that printmaking happens always, ongoing, cyclitic with destruction and renewal. Rather than trying to make time tangible (which is a whole other philosophical essay), perhaps we will instead comment on the time consumed and invested in the process. It is a virtue to have patience when encountering print-practice, which often involves long periods of waiting, trial-and-error, doing and redoing, and constant negotiation with a temperamental medium, which doesn’t always behave as it should.  

In regards to where printmaking occurs, this is often in specified studios due to its technical demands and necessary equipment such as presses, inks, chemistry, exposure units, wash out bays, etc. The communal or shared nature of these environments lends them to be highly social, often generating collaboration in a space marked by generosity and exchange. It oscillates between a lively and dynamic atmosphere, to a quiet reverent, sacred space. However, further to our last answer, as printmaking occurs in our everyday, this can include our interiors and exteriors, in a purposeful or accidental manner.

To avoid going into the technical approaches to the medium, which would require several hundred pages of instructions, we are going to be more nuanced in our response to how printmaking happens. Printmaking is physically demanding and technically challenging, which has historically led to the perception and consideration of print as man’s labour, not suitable for ‘docile’ or ‘delicate’ women, which is a funny notion in the context of More Than Reproduction. It requires methodical movements – over and over – a choreography of push and pull, of contact and pressure, of accumulation and repetition. It is laborious and has many steps and procedures across preparation and processing; physically, chemically, digitally, and physiologically.

Printmaking is bound in process, yet sometimes requires you to relinquish trying to control it completely. It demands a level of flexibility and adaptability, especially to prepare for the unexpected, which at some point or another arises. Printmaking has an innately deceptive physical quality, where there are often no apparent signs of the labour that has gone into it –similar to housework, where the sign of success is no trace at all. Speaking of messes, there is usually a lot of cleaning up and wiping to be done, sometimes this takes just as long as the printing does. That’s why it is often helpful to have many hands available, printing often shifting between the individual and the collective – trust us, an extra pair of clean hands goes a long way in the throes of printing.

As demonstrated by the difficulty (or inability) in defining the who, what, when, where of the medium, a similar thing occurs when trying to determine why. Although this question holds the most significance in our opinion, as well as being the most complicated to answer. So, here are some possible answers:

Perhaps it's that printmaking lies within the discourse of humanity; it is a mimicry of what we are as humans in its falsification of the identical—all the same, yet different? Perhaps it’s the marks we make, leave or impress—our transferences and transgressions—on the matrix, on the surface, on each other? Perhaps it's because as a dialectical image, the imprint indicates touch (the impression), but also loss (the absence)—holding traces of both the touch of loss and the loss of touch? Perhaps it’s because printmaking could be considered a kind of mirror, reflecting an image and yourself, or many mirrors reflecting other mirrors, until you end up with a repetitious kaleidoscope?  Perhaps it’s because it's familiar – we interact with print everyday – yet, unfamiliar. Perhaps it's this constant question of what is authentic, original, or unique? Passing through many thresholds and back again. Perhaps it's the instinctive pull toward the spiritual and therapeutic power of the repetitive—to enact upon something, over and over? 

Perhaps it’s the collegiality and connectivity of the space and the forming of co-operatives and collectives that often ensues? Or that due to the expense of equipment and its laborious nature, printmaking is often a collaborative act involving human-human and human-non-human interactions? Perhaps it's that the workshop could be considered a stage on which we perform; where we find or lose ourselves?

Perhaps it’s the shape-shifting nature of print, endlessly at odds with itself? Or paradoxically its distinctive essence and the sensorial qualities of the media and its instruments? Or that despite how much we attempt to control all the variables it can surprise us? Perhaps it's the act of excavating, indenting, carving, and pushing through? Perhaps it's the romanticism of it all—often underpinned by the cost and time investment, where the intimacy and control over a matrix is slowly relinquished? 

Perhaps it’s the paradoxical malleability of a rigid medium that has often remained responsive to its contexts and fluid in its function? Perhaps we are pulled into the play between the material’s receptive temperament and transformative potential, whilst also grappling with its obstinate inclinations. Or the oxymoronic shifting back and forth between its strictures and the agency for exploring possibilities as something to be negotiated with, rather than defeated by.

Perhaps it’s the mystic of it all; undefinable and ever-changing.