Exhibition Text
by Sarah Rose
‘to print’ delves into the possibilities and intersections between printmaking and performance as a reaction to–and rejection of–the objectification of print. Curated by More Than Reproduction, the exhibition blurs the boundaries between process, outcome, and spectatorship, exploring the implication of the body and temporal nature of both mediums. Featuring new and recent works, artists Lucinda Bird, Bea Buckland-Willis, Cailyn Forrest, and Teeya Ryan explore how printmaking methods can be used within performances; how prints can hold the trace of these actions; and how printmaking can challenge the passive role of the audience.
When we think about printmaking, your first thought is not always its demand on the body or the collective movement of bodies within the physical space (or stage) of the workshop/print studios/darkroom. However, printmaking is grounded in the interplay between absence and presence. Art historian Georges Didi-Huberman’s comments that the imprint is the ‘dialectical image’ and is something that as well as indicating touch (the foot which impresses itself into the sand) also indicates the loss (the absence of the foot in its imprint); something which shows us both the touch of the loss as well as the loss of the touch [1]. And yet, there is often an emancipation of the printer’s body from the work. There is a contradiction that occurs, where traditional printmaking approaches have often sought to eradicate any trace of the touch from its maker, and by proxy the ‘performance’ that preceded it. Subversively, the artists in to print negotiate these politics by collapsing this condition, leaving in these traces of touch and the body, and seek to capture the very essence of performance, positing that the act of doing is also the act of becoming.
Cailyn Forrest investigates the darkroom as a site of introspection and performativity within a feminist lens. The print captures her bodily ritual of repetitive printing processes which transmute the body into a print and offer it as a remnant of time. Faded and out of focus–in motion–there is an innate essence of movement and labour of image production. Perceptively muted in the amber hue of a darkroom, Forrest’s body is evasive in this space and avoids being completely fixed, much like the paste up that will ultimately be destroyed in its removal from the wall.
Through a series of prompts–or rather directives–Lucinda Bird subverts the traditional role of the passive spectator, asking the audience to become performers by bending and folding their bodies to read the text etched on the curved forms. Weighed down by paper sandbags, unstable through screen-printed imagery with graphite powder–porous to both time and touch–counterweight the metal as anchorage. Creating counter-archives, Bird explores performances of power in vernacular photography, returning to familial photographic archives sourced in junk shops, to focus in on uncomfortable gestures of bodies performing in front of the lens, most recognisably in these works are the hands of the subjects. Bird poses a provocation when it comes to considering loss, as a byproduct of attempting to preserve fleeting moments in time.
Fragments found throughout the space are remnants of Bea Buckland-Willis’ ongoing investigations into representations of the body in pain and alternative temporal ‘crip’ spaces. Through ritualisation and reenacted performative acts, they use printmaking as an extension of bodily performance. Using relief printing techniques, they materially explore gypsum plaster as an embodied material, due to its prevalence in medicine as a scaffold for the broken body, and as an inexpensive reproductive device in artistic contexts. Both are durable, yet fragile and prone to deterioration. The body is poetically encountered through these shards, where the artist casts and re-casts, cures and dismantles, alluding to the unreliable nature of memory and the pain experience.
Teeya Ryan’s performative printmaking practice is grounded in the body and labour, which the work ultimately questions. Text steeped with angst and gusto, makes a statement on capitalism and the financial precarity of pursuing a career in the arts. This large scale print is the result of a performance which saw the artist punch a lino print repeatedly onto a roll of paper. A new performance activated during the exhibition, a ‘reply all’ to this previous work, focuses on critiquing what it is we consider valuable. Subversive to traditional printmaking, prints are made quickly in the gallery space and perforated onto receipt spikes, actively devaluing their commercial viability as a provocation.
[1] Ruth Pelzer-Montada, “Authenticity in Printmaking – A Red Herring?” (paper presented at the 2nd IMPACT International Printmaking Conference, University of Art and Design, Helsinki, Finland, August 29 – September 2, 2001), citing and translating Georges Didi-Huberman (1999).