The print as trace.
Monoprint is an entirely new element of my practice. Until this module, I had never before attempted to make a monoprint. I purchased some books on it, built a kit of equipment, watched a lot of videos and began to experiment.
I welcomed the fact that, like the other aspects of my work, monoprint is about the process as much as the product. There were as many prints that were disappointing as there were ones that were impressive. This practice, for me, became rooted in the slow, uncomfortable and unexpected. It became meditative.
Monoprint required me to fully embrace the chance of automatism, the impermanence, the art brut rawness. Each print was unrepeatable and transient, which spoke to my own shifting sense of identity as an artist. The ghost prints, smudges, messy finger prints, partial transfers, echoed the mixture of feelings that I experienced during transition. This felt like it particularly mirrored that liminal space – the space between ideas, between who I was and who I was becoming. This medium became intensely vulnerable, I often felt moments of failure but also moments of immense pride; this liminal space of transformation where I am taking risk is certainly where I am most creative.
Risk lives in every pull of a print – the imperfections, which I worried about at the beginning (frequently cursing myself for being messy and leaving finger prints everywhere), are traces of myself. They show were I was less confident, where I hesitated, my hand slipped or I held my breath. The prints, like the walks, poems and prints, became a trace of me. The process of printing became an act of self-discovery; again it became about the ritualistic process as much as the product.
As I grew more confident, I began to experiment with pulling images from photographs I had taken and creating prints that centred around symbols from my walks. These prints became more and more ghostly which felt cohesive with the pyschogeograhpic element of my work. The layers of meaning, place and time were beginning to come out in the monoprints also. I also tried creating some automatic prints, using acrylic and ink, where I just thought about how the landscapes made me feel.
This ghostly nature of the prints, echoed regularly as a theme in my poems, reflected my obsession with Justin Hopper’s book Old Weird Albion. I must reflect more on the importance of this in relation to place.
‘When we pass by a place, loiter beside it, more so when we live our fiery lives within it, that place retains some trace of our passing. A place on the edge can do more than just retain a memory like an imprint’ (Hopper, 2017, p. 56).
‘However faint or ephemeral their traces on land may be, their trails remain etched in the memories of those that follow them’ (Ingold, 2016, p. 78).
When I think about my monoprints, I remember my walk at Bramber. I can see a girl laying flowers at a grave and the ghostly print of the Bramber ruins, etched in my mind as a shape. I think too about Justin Hopper’s book and how his writing travels through the landscape I live in – Eastbourne and Chanctonbury. I think about him looking for a lost family member in Eastbourne, where I grew up and where my late beloved grandmother lived. I think about the spiritual energy of Chanctonbury, how many people have felt and continue to feel it’s power. I think about how I am just a part of this great map, the traces and the rhizomes across the landscape. I think about where I, as a person, fit into all of that. My mind can hardly hold it all and so my hand inks the plate and pulls a print as a way of trying to capture all of that sense of place, time and self. I thought it was about finding myself as an artist, but maybe it is more than that?
