Bibliography
Grabowski, B. Flick, B (2023) Printmaking: A Complete Guide to Materials and Processes. London: Laurence King Publishing
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Reeves, K (1999). The Re-vision of Printmaking, in Pelzer-Montada, R. (ed.) Perspectives on Contemporary Printmaking. Manchester University Press.
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B, Wyss (1997). Fragments for an art history of media: electr(on)ic thinking, in Pelzer-Montada, R (ed.) Perspectives on Contemporary Printmaking. Manchester University Press, pp.16-24.
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Jamme, F A (2011). Tantra Song: Tantric painting from Rajasthan. California: Siglio Press.
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Hahn, C (2017). The Reliquary Effect: Enshrining the Sacred Object. London: Reaktion Books.
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Falckenberg, H. Weibel, J (2009). Paul Thek: The Artist's Artist. Massachussets: MIT Press
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Merleau-Ponty, M. (1948). The World of Perception. Reprint, Oxford: Routledge, 2004
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Reid, C. (2009). A Scattering. London: Arete Ltd
Page, T (2022). Placemaking: A new materialist theory of pedagogy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press
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​Eliot, T.S (1950.) The Cocktail Party. Reprint, London: Faber and Faber, 1969
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Martin-Gachot, E (2023) ‘Artist Nina Hartmann Sculpts an Alphabet Out of the Dark Methods of Powerful Institutions’, Cultured Magazine, (September)
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Solt, J (2011) Shredding the Tapestry of Meaning: The Poetry and Poetics of Kitasono Katue (1902-1978). Harvard University Press
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Peters, J (2021) Fluminalis. Available at: https://www.fluminalis.com/home (Accessed 17/01/2025)
Nassar, A (2024) Graphite Geography. Available at: https://drawingroom.org.uk/read-listen-watch/graphite-geography-by-aya-nassar/ (Accessed 18/01/2025)
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Drawing Room: Tannery Arts Ltd (2024/2025) Emma McNally: The Earth is Knot Flat. Available athttps://drawingroom.org.uk/exhibition/emma-mcnally-the-earth-is-knot-flat/ Accessed 18/01/2025)
Love, J (2025) Johanna Love. Available at: https://www.johannalove.co.uk/ (Accessed 25/01/2025)
Fairnington, M (2025) Mark Fairnington. Available at: https://markfairnington.com/ (Accessed 27/01/2025)
Wilhide Justin, C (2024) Carol Wilhide Justin ARE. Available at: https://www.carolwilhide.com/ (Accessed 29/12/2024)
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Solt, J (2002/2024) The John Solt Kitasono Katue Collection. Available at: https://www.kitasonokatue.com/ (Accessed 12/01/2025)
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Dupuy, L (2023/2024) Lucas Dupuy. Available at: http://lucasdupuy.com/ (Accessed 09/01/2025)
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Gates, S (2021) Lumengram (various)
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Hartmann, N (2023) Tools for Psychic Warfare
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Hartmann, N (2023) Declassified UFO Proof
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Thek, P (1966) Untitled from the series Technological Reliquaries
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Kiaer, I. (2020) Endnote ping, (J-L Cheret)
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Key Artists
Ian Kiaer
Vivianne Sassen
Ansei Uchima
Sula Bermudez-Silverman
Carol Wyss
Ron Nagle
Bettina Speckner
Pieter Vermeersch
Artist Talk: Jo Love
I'll begin by admitting that has been a long time between watching this lecture and writing this contextual analysis. However, in re-reading my lecture notes now, at the end of Unit 1, I would like to examine some of the themes and key points that I find increasingly relevant as I continue to develop my own practice. In documenting my work over the past few months, I have been surprised at how important the photographic image has become in my creative practice. As I begin to see digital and analogue photography, photo collage and film as a big part of my work, I have begun to reflect on what the photographic image is able to say and do, in the context of my artwork. In a recent tutorial with Jo Love, when I mentioned, I suppose with concern, that I had stopped drawing, I was asked why, and was unable to explain apart from that photography has, it seems, taken over a little. This resulted in a conversation about drawing or printing onto the surface of photographs, which interests me because it seems that the drawn, painted and printed mark exists in another visual plane to the photographic, which starts to say important things about perception, reality and duality. ​​​​​
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Love's research and art practice explores dust as a physical 'archive' of personal and collective memory and as a means of capturing the surface of 'illusionistic space' within the digital and analogue image. Her experiments with drawing onto photographs make us consider where the surface lies; what form or depth are we seeing or sensing; in what ways do we understand the image plane? On her website, she explains: 'I started by drawing small particles of dust in graphite pencil onto the surface of printed photographic images and became interested in how such a simple act brought about an entirely new sense of reading and meaning to the work'. In the lecture, Love described her experiments using a flatbed scanner to photograph dust particles, the dust being the only signifier of materiality, surface and depth.
Johanna Love, Lumograph Mars I, 2015, graphite pencil on inkjet print, 100cm x 200cm.
Dust is everywhere, and constitutes every thing; except, writes Love, 'a digital image held within the computer'. The digital image exists apart from the material world and so is 'hidden from dust, hidden from our human sense of temporality, materiality and perception of scale.' I am interested in the idea of finding ways of making the immaterial material, and the insubstantial substantial. In my need to begin drawing again, I am seeking ways to add a material layer, a human-made surface onto the digital or photographic plane. This might involve monoprinting or woodblock printing onto digital prints.
The works included, Lumograph Mars I and Lumograph Mars I which Johanna Love completed in 2015, have a beautiful temporality; the regularity of the pencil marks are embodied and human. They suggest looking and slowness. Love talks about the slowness of looking when referencing the text by Hanneke Grootenboer The Pensive Image: Art as a Form of Thinking. The drawn mark is direct and embodied; it activates the printed image. We look at it and through its surface; this way of looking makes the print seem more of an object; more tactile.
Johanna Love, Lumograph Mars II, 2016, graphite pencil on inkjet print, 100cm x 200cm
Installation (detail), digital projection and mixed media, 2024
My recent installation included a film projected up through a grey acrylic surface, a moving image playing amongst prints on paper. The film, my hand touching the surface and moving in and out of focus, was an attempt to insert touch and human presence into my work. When I consider the Lumograph Mars series, and Love's way of conceptualising dust as a material plane, I think my urge to draw might be a more direct way of inserting my touch and embodiment into my work. Examining a painted photograph or graphite drawing on an inkjet print requires a slightly different way of looking, and I am interested in exploring this further as I go into Unit 2 of the Masters.
Artist Talk: Mark Fairnington
What's the Point of Realism?
Mark Fairnington's lecture titled 'What's the Point of Realism' began with Fairnington's examination of a painting of a painstakingly detailed Dutch canal scene. The artwork is an example of 'neurotic faith in detail' and faith in the 'truth' of realistic depiction.
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'Fairnington's paintings are known for their intense realism and observed detail' (https://markfairnington.com/biography/) and his subjects include animals, insects, flowers and patches of landscape, as well as documenting taxidermy collections and scientific curiosities within vast museum storage facilities. Fairnington's paintings are often huge in scale, and so sharply rendered that I view them as hyper-realistic, though Fairnington does not use this term when talking about his work. For me, the hyper is necessary because we just don't see with that homogenous sense of clarity. Depth of field softens edges and focus shifts; vision is the eye in motion, pulsing with the body and continually re-adjusting as we blink.
Fairnington's lecture moves onto Ruskin's championing of 'truth to nature' which instructed painters that they should root their art in true experience and close observation of the natural world. Fairnington points out that 'observation is never neutral', and in talking about his art practice, we see that alongside his objective realism, it is in the compositional staging of his works that we see the artist's subjective standpoint. This is most clearly seen in his paintings of taxidermied animals which are unnervingly staged and obviously composite into their arrangement. Fairlington explained how his compositions are often created by collaging photographs using Photoshop. In this way he is able to capture the extreme detail of individual sections of his subjects.​​
Mark Fairnington,The Awakening, oil on canvas, 100cm x 128cm
My use of photography is to record my subject and its detail, but then through editing I tend to select methods of flattening and homogenising to the point where realism is somewhat lost. ​Assemblages of varying materials become abstract compositions yet, because they are are photographs, they are by virtue of their medium, reality. For me, Realism, through photography, is more a decision of medium, an aesthetic choice.
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Fairnington presented a painting by Spanish artist Juan Sánchez Cotán, which he says is often revered because of its composition; the angle of cucumber and melon slice in the bottom right of the painting meditations on spherical geometry. Here again, reality is composite and staged, to great effect.
​​Fairnington concluded his lecture by returning to his most recent series of paintings which are inspired by 'Sottobosco' paintings, depictions of undergrowth or forest still-life. Fairnington began these works while he was undergoing treatment for cancer, and in his lecture he reflected on the significance of the works. The question 'What's the Point of Realism?' could become 'What is Realism?' when we question the neutrality of Realism in art. Even when we strive for obsessive, truthful detail, observation is never truly objective.​
In connection with this, Fairnington referenced a quote by Proust which fascinates me in its conception of disembodiment, relating to some of the ideas within my work. The quote, from 'In Search of Lost Time' is: 'It is in moments of illness that we are compelled to recognize that we live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom, whole worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body.'
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Mark Fairnington, The Night Watch, oil on canvas, 214 x 35cm
Juan Sánchez Cotán, Still Life with Quince, Cabbage, Melon, and Cucumber, c. 1602, oil on canvas, 68.9 cm x 84.46 cm
Drawing Room Gallery Visit
Both the MA Printmaking and Drawing courses were invited to the Drawing Room Gallery in Bermondsey for a tour of the exhibition The Earth is Knot Flat by the London-based artist Emma McNally. I had visited the exhibition when it had first opened, and my first etching on the Masters was based on a close-up photograph I had taken of the exhibition. Of the many photographs I had taken, this particular composition inspired me the most because of the paper 'vessel' in the foreground, lit on each corner. ​
Digital photograph, 2024
Soft ground and aquatint print on Somerset paper, 2024
The exhibition tour was scheduled to be led by the gallery's director Mary Doyle, but was instead taken by another member of the Drawing Room team, and was followed by an introduction to the Gallery Library. We were introduced to the history of Drawing Room which was founded in 2002 by its curators Mary Doyle, Kate Macfarlane and Kathernine Stout, and relies on Arts Council funding as well as support from trusts and individuals. It describes itself as `non-profit public organisation that champions the unlimited potential of drawing to help us understand ourselves, each other and our world, through exhibitions, learning projects and a unique library' (Drawing Room website).
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My first impressions of the installation were around landscape and topography, the land being created by a frenzied artist or genius scientist, looking to physically map a place or a process, the drawings a product of crazed investigation. Instead of solving the puzzle, a new landscape is formed which the audience is left to puzzle over. ​
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Aya Nassar, an academic in the field of Human Geography, writes an essay in response to McNally's exhibition and interrogates what she terms 'modern promises' of Geography and Science, these authorities in the certitude of mapping and charting. 'These are not what will hold us together', writes Nassar. In the crumpled dusty masses of drawings, McNally is undoing this rational, dominant approach to mapping our world. The content of the drawings are, interestingly, informed by geological processes. McNally's drawing practice attempts to 'chart shifting systems of immense complexity' (drawingroom.org.uk, 2024) such as weather systems, coral formation and satellite imagery.
Nassar quotes McNally: 'maps are becoming matter', which seems to then transform the 'data' of drawing into an abundance of stuff. But the stuff is illuminated from beneath, and light from the projector plays about its surface. The transformation of ideas into matter (paper, graphite, gum arabic, etc) is theatrical and mysterious, and playful - I imagined jumping into it. Visitors are given tiny torches to illuminate the details and it makes us feel like children playing at exploring.
As a result, we don't feel as if we're confronting a wreckage or act of disposal; we feel in some way part of the interpretation process, or the artist's re-interpretation of marks into matter. The work is about the very human way of confronting, or perhaps resigning ourselves to, the inevitability of our impact on the world. We are actively entangled with it whether we like it or not. ​​​​
This active involvement is upheld brilliantly by the learning and community project 'Tangle Room' which is the first space we see when we enter the installation room.
As part of my research I have been re-visiting an area of art pedagogy called 'embodied learning' which supposes that learning is grounded in the recognition that experience, perception and knowledge are shaped through the activity of our body in relation to the world.​
When I completed my PGCE, I was influenced greatly by the research of my tutor Tara Page, whose studies into Embodied and Material pedagogies are about how we gain a sense of place and a sense of self by engaging in and with the material world. Reading Page's essay Teaching and Learning with Matter (Page, 2018), I became engaged in the ideas of New Materialism, which 'posits matter as agentive, indeterminate, constantly forming and reforming in unexpected ways' (Coole and Frost 2010). Page writes about the 'intra-relationship' between bodies and things, and how this relationship is not as separate as it once was. Page writes: 'Such a perspective abandons any idea of matter as inert and subject to predictable forces. Matter is always becoming.'
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In Emma McNally's exhibition, we are confronted by matter and we are allowed to step amongst it; explore its details with torches, and then we are invited to make our own matter, our own entanglement. In amongst the action words: 'rip', fold', 'erase', 'layer', tie', there are other words which might make their way into the action: 'pollution', 'graphite', 'fossil fuel', 'landscape', 'community'. It works that these words are not the learning event; they hang there quietly, perhaps a conversation-starter amongst the busy activity of making, which might be taken up and considered in the most effective way. There is no teaching here; there is engagement in matter.
