to ruffle the feathers of patriarchal dovecotes

by Sarah Rose

With or without the visibility they deserve, women artists have engaged with printmaking since its beginning. And yet, due to its nature as physically demanding and technically challenging, printmaking has often been considered man’s labour, not suitable for ‘delicate’ and ‘docile’ women (*eye roll*). This exclusion from the canon isn’t particularly unexpected; not when women have been bound and suppressed throughout the historiography of art, which saw them positioned on the peripheries, voices not heard at the same volume nor held with the same credence as men (*double eye roll*). As art historian Linda Nochlin advised in her groundbreaking feminist essay ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’(1), women were not given the same opportunities as men, educational or otherwise, and thus had to push against dogmatic expectations, where home and hearth were centralised. This extends beyond gendered ontology and relegation, but also stems from the notion that up until recently printmaking was itself considered subsidiary to other mediums, due to its preconceptions as a practice led by mass reproduction. Feminist art historians bemoan that women artists working with print consequently feature even less frequently in art historical studies as a result, situating them as doubly marginalised and in a state of dissent. 

Women have played an integral role within the medium’s revolution and redefinement, calling gender into question as it spans social and technological transformation. From the women (wives, daughters, sisters) who came from engraving families of the 17 and 18th centuries across Europe to the establishment of the ‘Women’s Printing Society’ in Britain in the 19th century, opportunities for women to gain employment and autonomy grew steadily and subversively. From those who pioneered avant-garde printmaking in the 1940-50s through New York’s ‘Atelier 17’—a workshop fostering camaraderie and a network of sisterhood decades before the women’s art movement of the 1970s—to those who you see before you as part of More Than Reproduction’s contemporary print-community, women printmakers have been prevalent since its origins, gathering together to usurp traditions, to make trouble, to call into question, to ruffle the feathers of patriarchal dovecotes(2).

Edition Four introduces entanglements and juxtapositions of cultural and aesthetic sensibilities, creating a platform that situates different (yet similar) artistic dialects and practices in the same space, within the same conversation. Surveying the breadth and depth of contemporary print-practice by women, Edition Four marks More Than Reproduction’s fourth exhibition in their annual ‘Edition’ series, which coincides with the artist-run initiative’s anniversary—purposely falling on the 8th of March, International Women’s Day. Exploring the malleability of contemporary printmaking practice and its interdisciplinary nature, the exhibition features the recent work of 15 artists from the artist-run initiative's monthly artist profile program.

Printmaking in the twenty-first century is permeated by porosity, whereby print-practice simultaneously relies upon and collapses tradition, welcoming the incursions of other mediums, materials and spatial activation. There is an openness to expanding the boundaries (to pull, push and stretch), alongside the tautness and tension of what is historically considered to be a traditional medium that actively opposes the unconventional. There is an impetus to maintain and acknowledge print’s specificity and process-driven nature, yet position it within a larger discourse that aligns print-practice with the contemporary. The last 20 years have seen the medium bend and morph to encapsulate new technologies and new approaches to the field, embracing a cross-pollination of art forms existing in hybridity and blurring the edges of techniques and mediums; the parameters ever-widening and possibilities ever-increasing. In alignment with our contemporary condition, printmaking exists within the interstitial depths of the past and the seductive surface of the present; where originality and repetition, singularity and multiplicity, the reproducible and unique, the falsified and authentic, all converge and co-exist. Experimentation as a methodology is at the nucleus of this exhibition, with artists dancing in the expanded field to present a multifarious offering of etching, linocut, lithography, serigraphy, risography, photo-transfer and monoprinting. 

When the medium has encountered such hardship in its pursuit of recognition, it begs the question—why do printmakers make prints?

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 this constant question of what is authentic, original, or unique? Perhaps it's the instinctive pull toward the spiritual power of the repetitive—to enact upon something, over and over? 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 the collegiality and connectivity of this 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 act of excavating, indenting, carving, and pushing through? Perhaps it's the romanticism of it all—often punctured by the cost and time investment, where the intimacy and control over a matrix is slowly relinquished as it moves through the stages? Perhaps it's because as a dialectical image, the imprint indicates both touch (the impression), but also loss (the absence)—holding traces of both the touch of loss and the loss of touch? Perhaps it’s the paradoxical malleability of a rigid medium that has often remained responsive to its contexts and fluid in its function? 

Perhaps it is all that has been mentioned, or none of the above.

It's interesting to think about how contemporary print-practice draws from the epidermis of our lives; representing the world around us, the self, and the other. Although disparate, the works in Edition Four reflect this broader inquiry, demonstrating a sense of connectedness, not through a linear inheritance, but through synchronicity; acausal coincidences, whereby there is unity in diversity. In the labyrinth-like gallery space—full of passageways and alternate routes—parallels and polarities across materiality and conceptual underpinnings are prevalent. The ethereal cloudscapes of Nicole Pellow’s CMYK transient screenprints oppose the ground-based work of Annabelle McEwen’s digitally constructed and disrupted photo transfers, which are reflected in Emily O’Neill’s screenprint that explores the virtual space as a site of communication and cultural production. Artists Danielle Creenaune, Charlotte Fetherston, Helen Morgan, and Olivia Arnold all explore the aesthetics of our interior and exterior architectures, and our surroundings more broadly through a language of abstraction and gesture, drawing upon personal and collective memories of site familiarity and nostalgia. Navigating cultural and familial experiences, Mai Cao’s print installation emulates a street-scape of Hanoi, Vietnam, using screen printed imagery to link to memories of migration and connection to place, whilst Linda Sok engages with her own diasporic Cambodian heritage through merging screen printing and weaving, exploring intergenerational trauma. The textual relief casts of Sari Walker-Woods archive the forensic examination of translation, interaction and interdimensional trauma between an object and its touch, which is poignantly echoed in Siobhan O’Connor’s monumental screen printed scroll, holding court at the centre of the space to discuss personal experiences of sexual violence and the effects of rape culture as concealed and hidden plight. This sense of erasure is reflected in Carolyn Craig’s speculation on self and her effacing of imposed enclosures through freestanding sculptural portraits. Sylvie Veness’ similarly navigates a self-reflexive practice through hand-sewing post-production as a way of channeling kinaesthetic sensations and subconscious memories. The self and its emotional complexities are further seen in the works of Jacqui Driver and Lotte Alexis Smith, who navigate mental health and reconnection as a form of safety or community, yet in opposing tones. These are just some of the many links and connections beside and between the works in the exhibition, demonstrating the diversity of the medium in both its subject matter and materiality.  

With its anthropomorphic reproductive parts and processes, the printing press could be considered a kind of copulating body. In fact, throughout history the press itself was allegorised and gendered, with its most significant parts even likened to the male genitals imprinting on female parts (3). These insinuations further the notion that women have been the keepers of reproduction since the beginning, with the imprint sharing semantics with biological reproduction—generation, copying, duplication, multiplying, gravidity and succession—all in the attempt to preserve, perpetuate and propagate. 

But, we as women are more than our ability to procreate and, similarly to contemporary printmaking, we are more than reproduction. 

__________

(1) Linda Nochlin, ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ in Women, Art, and Power: and Other Essays (New York: Harper and Row, 1988)

(2) Ibid.

(3) Margreta de. Grazia, ”Imprints: Shakespeare, Gutenberg and Descartes.” Printing and Parenting in Early Modern England. Ed. Douglas A. Brooks. (Burlington: Ashgate, 2005.) 29-58.