Printmaking......

Printmaking was invented to make exact copies, to allow the distribution of information and knowledge in the sciences, in medicine, in politics and religion so our general preconceptions of print as “copies” are inevitably bound up with these origins. This is by no means a bad thing and artists can exploit reproducibility as part of their enterprise; equally they can distort the potential for reproducibility in many ways, through the process itself, modifying the finished print or the printing place/block between each impression, or by printing on a variable materials, or indeed through a decision to limit the ‘edition’ to one unique piece.

Printmaking today provides a myriad of opportunities for the artist to explore and develop its potential. A finished print exists in dialogue with the accumulated layers of activity that contribute to its creation.

The diversity of artworks that contemporary printmakers are creating is both exciting and stimulating. Works which cannot be reduced or contained by a single word, but encompass the sculptural, painterly, ephemeral, tangible, illustrative, drawn and photographic — at times simultaneously. Printmaking is not a peripheral artistic practice hovering at the edges of fine art, but an embedded medium within this paradigm that has both earned and deserves its place.

Printmaking allows for a material process of play, experimentation and exploration, often resulting in both a finite and contained object but also a multifaceted work that leads the viewer down a number of different interpretative paths. 

The notion of flatness can be endlessly associated with printmaking; the flat surface, of the 2D object, hung upon the flat wall. Yet, many of the works created by contemporary printmakers today dispel this pejorative assumption, as the prints venture into the territory of sculpture, playing with form, space, depth and the physical relationship of the viewer to object.

A few of the many artists pushing the boundaries in Print making today: Cathryn Kemp, Brenda Hartill, Dawn Cole, Claire Bayliss......

Comments and open discussion very welcome - in fact encouraged and gratefully received.