The prints shown here are the result of my year of work for the RSA Residency bursary which I undertook at Edinburgh Printmakers. I set out to explore connections between drawing and printmaking; more specifically I learned to etch, fascinated by the fragility and delicacy of line and desirous to create repeated, fine, wiry, lines, similar to those I often employ in my drawings.
For me printmaking is a way of making a series of images which construct a changing, ambiguous narrative, where the same motif reappears carrying differing meanings in various images. I do not seek to represent anything seen, rather I aim to conjure an otherness, an excess, by distorting into reality. My prints and drawings are ‘inscapes’, inner landscapes of the mind. They depict human bodies gone a bit awry, plants, machines, other living creatures doing strange things, suggesting a lurking madness.
The ‘same but different’ aspect of printmaking, is evoked by reworking with ink or colour pencil hand additions two near identical prints in different ways, creating ‘unique multiples’.
I am also interested in the idea of reversal, inherent in the etching process, and which can be seen as a metaphor for opposites and dualities, themes I explore in my work in relation to my double/split identity, between Scottish and French origins and languages, but also as an artist and a mother.
Following on from this printmaking experience I am now developing a new project involving printing, notably the creation and self-publication of a series of home-printed multiples (folded leaflets, zines, ‘papillons’ and other small multiples) which combine text and image. I intend to widely disseminate these through alternative modes of distribution, another form of ‘creative resistance’.
