I am spending the bank holiday sifting through and reviewing the many prints and design ideas I have made during my time at Uclan and somewhat belatedly beginning the process of uploading images onto the website. Images posted thus far were made early on when I was getting to grips with unfamiliar printing processes and media.
More images will be posted over the coming days showing further devlopments. Our AA2A exhibition at Uclan is during September which gives me the summer to resolve and construct finished pieces, to be photographed after the show.
My intention had been to focus on screen printing until I discovered it was possble to laser etch wood and rubber printing blocks. I was initally drawn to this process because of the wonderfully tactile nature of the blocks themselves and the way in which varyings degrees of hardness in the wood etch down to different levels revealing the grain line in the blocks themselves and in the print process.
Hand printing the blocks with oil based colours mixed from first priciples (dry pigments, copper plate oil and much elbow grease) let me take control over the relationship between colours and their varying degress of transparency/opacity. I think it was at this late point I felt I was starting to take ownership of the processes and techniques and was beginning to immerse myself in making work which had a purpose in life....more about ideas and creative image making. And discovering a natural link between digital and first hand making.
To reintroduce a greater degree of surafce texture using stitch and construction techniques into print is my next challenge although I have been having issues about how to do this without it being simply stitch for stitched sake.
And as an guilty aside the knowledge that I havent really found a way of integrating work made on my digital sewing machine without the results looking industrial and contrived. Thanks to our always resourceful and ever helpful senior technician (Katherine Owen) who has an amazing knowledge of all things related to digital textile and much more I have been encouraged to try a variety of ways of working into the prints which will forge a meaningful relationship between the flat printed image and areas of stitch. Watch this space for further developments.
Ruth