Lecturer on MA Printmaking
Artist, Researcher, Educator
Images about history, images about dust
Viia Celmins, Ocean Surface 1983, Drypoint
Pictures that aren’t just what we look at but how we see
“… To experience a passing present … embrace slowness as a medium to ponder the meaning … of being present today”
Stories of war from grandparents being in Hamburg and the horrors they saw, capturing the oral first-hand experiences
Wouldn’t refer to self as only a print maker, but a focus on print and what could achieve with print AND photography at PhD
Process of drawing is key, essential
Magnification of pencil drawing on double matte printed photograph surface
It’s a physical matter, that’s why she loves it, can see the graphite sitting on the page like gold dust
Dust images > Technology > History
Landscape images Material > Time
Knowing
Collected dust from cellar/attic of house where her grandparents lived in war, miracle wasn’t bombed
Approached Natural History Museum in London, underneath is where all the influential scientists working on PhDs work, allowed her to look at the dust samples in their laboratories
Looking at these images is where she understood the difference between art and science
Microscopic images were cold, alien, not made through light, hard to work with beyond the fact that the imaging was amazing
“…the Scientific Image is astonishingly different from how things appear to us. Yet science is meant to represent the very same world in which we live -- and there is the rub.”
– Van Fraassen, The Manifest Image and the Scientific Image (1995)
“…such touching, or such a touch, is the sole condition for true thought”
– Jean-Luc Nancy (2008)
Led to graphite drawings
Bentlage Gardens of Relics 15th Century, Kloster Bentlage, Germany
Found jar that had bones that were too small for this embellished decorative wall, but at bottom of jar had turned to dust
Conservator of the monastery emptied it out onto a conservation cloth and put the bones back in, let her take the dust to analyse at NHM
Found natural materials that the jar was gathering due to t being surrounded by a forest, more so than human remains
Commissioned to make a body of prints in Paris
Friction/rubbing correlation between images in our phones and the images we make every day, creates a rub through technologies as it translates between
Laser cutter – looking for something that can create MORE than ‘just’ an image, laser etching scientific images into paper where at some places falling apart and burning the paper
Rubbing graphite over the laser-etched pages, created a print of it’s own with the negative
“…certain artworks generate happenings – called pensive images – that create and encounter a state of suspension that forces us to think therefore able to articulate complex ideas in visual terms”
– Grootenboer, The Pensive Image
Capable of offering us a thought, rather than a meaning or narrative
From slow to stillness – of actually arresting the image, embalming in stone.
A dullness, stillness and silence, made without light
Something much bigger than itself, a static image, an image for thought.
“A present age as one of un-knowing, chimes with anxiety, post-pandemic, climate change and human conflict”
– James Bridle, The New Dark Age
“…even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all.”
– Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico- Philosophicus
Martina, quote from research that wasn’t used in paper but still found inspiring:
“Even a scientist is a human being. So it is natural for him, like others, to hate the things he cannot explain. It is a common illusion to believe that what we know today is all we ever can know. Nothing is more vulnerable than scientific theory, which is an ephemeral attempt to explain facts and not an everlasting truth in itself.”
– C.G. Jung, Man and His Symbols
Questions for Jo – with Roz and Inna
The relationship Jo has to her own dust
Idea of constantly cleaning, not rationalising that the dust was part of us at one point that’s separated
Analysing own dust of different time periods, stories that can tell
A group performance piece of consuming one another and producing more
Jo: All grey, no individual, all on equal playing field – which quite likes, why like grey as opposed to colour, all homogenised
Terrye: Do you think of a greater purpose in your work?
Jo: No, try to stay well clear, easily swayed into existential crisis
Catherine: How much of your work is for yourself, and how much is for the audience?
Jo: If just for me would shove in a draw, I must make it as I’m a maker and get it out, but important thing is having someone to talk to on it or would just work and live in a cupboard.
If don’t make work start to feel constipated, drowning in own ideas and thoughts, must get it out there and make changes.
It’s our job to get it out and share how we feel about the world through images and materials, open up new thoughts to others.
Alone in Berlin – Hans Fallada
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