In my artwork, I am interested in exploring experimentation and excited by the potential results that can come from allowing your work to be guided by in large part, by the process itself as opposed to being guided mainly by the artist themselves.
This openness and interest in process-based art has led me to pursue a variety of different methods and mediums has sent me down a path where I can combine and collage these different ideas, interests and ways of working into cohesive art pieces. To better explain my process, I will outline what I have been doing in my studio over the past few years.
Creating a World
I begin my productions by visualizing and thinking about a world I want to explore or create and see; I try and sketch this out… often literally. The process I use is a form of free association, allowing my interests to mix with different time periods that fold in on each other. Whether it's making references to ancient things like Scottish or Irish rock art and petroglyphs from thousands of years in the past or something ultra-futuristic like the science fiction film Blade Runner from 1984, with the elaborate backgrounds that are an essential part of the world-building in the film or Matisse's cut-outs produced in the late 1940s, brought into 2 ½ dimensions via my sculptural process, and then combined with with the familiar yet otherworldly prints of a Pictorialist photographer like Joseph Stieglitz or Alvin Langdon Coburn or a scientist/artist like Anna Atkins. Overall, I allow myself to move freely in my collection of references in the hope of producing something new for me.
Detailing the physical processes I use, I employ sculpture to make the worlds seen in my prints. Usually, I produce them using hand-made moulds into which I cast Plaster. I repeat this process again and again, creating enough objects to populate the entire picture plane within the images I make. Following my production of a sculptural world, I photograph the scenes created in series using a wheeled tripod that follows a track I have made using aluminum. I photograph in series, taking 20+ images of the set I have built. Once photographed, I bring these digital images into some kind of photo editing software such as Affinity or Photoshop/Lightroom. Here I combine the separate photos into a panoramic collage.
The Art of Reclaiming the Image
The image's length brings to mind a period and space in my mind, and this interesting exploration of a timeline fascinates me. Although these images are quite interesting on their own, I have always found digital images a little too easy to look at; I often find myself searching for pictures which are a little more mysterious. Maybe it’s an interest in the potential to abstract these worlds further and lose control of the process. I am not totally sure. To achieve this, I will take these digital images and transfer them back in time — you could say — using an archival process such as Photogravure, Cyanotype, sun printing, among many other methods. These processes are typically a bit archaic, and I find this endlessly exciting as they do act as a kind of… like a time machine.
The process does not always stop here though, more recently I have been exploring a few different ways in which I can even further complicate the process and explore a little more into the fascinating fog that is artistic creation, speaking to some of these further walks through the fog filled tunnel that is artistic exploration, I have been scanning and enlarging the physical prints I make and recreating them using digital inkjet printing on rag paper. One might think this reproduction process would take away from the clarity and materiality of the prints - as it digitizes and simulates the very physical nature of the processes and papers that make these works - but I find that although it can do this, it can also bring a great deal more clarity to the viewer and provide enlarged views of rich texture and detail, providing the spectator with a new perspective that they might not otherwise see. Although the work might be a simulation of the real, in many ways it feels ‘realer’.
“O’faolain” is a digital scan of a physical plaster print. A prime example of how digital reproduction can allow one to see the work in greater detail and re-contextualize it productively.
Another method I have employed in the past year has been on the opposite end of the technological spectrum, this being a return to relief printmaking using woodblocks, a process that is older than the 10th Century AD. This process uses carved wood rolled over with ink to produce an image which shows only the uncarved or relief areas of the woodblock. My next goal is to combine these two mediums of the digital and the aggressively physical together in work which both uses inkjet printing of scanned physical prints, while also printing physically and with ink onto these images, presenting these works as they stand on the wall of a gallery space.
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