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Maelstrom Trinity
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An essay to accompany the CFPR publication documenting work undertaken and editions published during Chuck Elliott's residency at the Centre for Print Research, UWE.
The Centre for Print Research >
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May 2023
Maelstrom Trinity. I wanted to immerse myself fully in the possibilities of the residency, to make sure that I used my time constructively, stepped well outside my comfort zone, and exploited at least some of the potential of the Centre for Print Research’s vast panoply of knowledge, resource and equipment.
The CFPR residency programme presents a working artist with an enormous challenge, although to some extent it’s the same challenge we face every day. The question of what to do for the best, when you’re confronted with near infinite possibilities. The dilemma of the blank canvas.
I like the idea of art as visual poetry, succinct phrases, not as expansive as a novel perhaps, but nevertheless able to impart some kind of feeling, a visual dialogue, an instinctive, intuitive message that can be almost subliminal in the way it communicates.
As ever, I wanted to make work that has some form of narrative arc, that is firmly rooted in this moment, and that could tell a story about our time, perhaps the story of our time, in some slightly oblique and hopefully fairly poetic ways.
To date, I have tended to focus on working with line, volume, colour and light, the most fundamental building blocks of visual art. I remain keen to engage with the history of abstraction, a methodology that spans back well over a hundred years. An exploration that remains a rich seam for connective thinking about nature, maths, geometry and the experience of living in a visual world surrounded by form, colour and light.
For the CFPR residency I also wanted to talk more directly about the climate crisis, how it’s changing the way I think, and changing my day-to-day practice in the studio.
I think the climate crisis invites us to think about the bigger picture, the entirety of the planet’s ecosystem as opposed to the nation state, perhaps for the first time, as well as focus on the smallest details of our daily lives and the impact those actions may have on the natural world. I enjoy that way of thinking. I find it quite Zen, to think about nature and daily life, as well as consider the smaller and more personal spaces of the studio and the garden.
I’ve tried to bind these elements together into a series of works that I hope push at the boundaries of contemporary making in the fields of print, sculpture and the digital. The CFPR, as much as anything else, is all about the interstitial space between print and the digital, or ink and tech if you like.
The opportunity to draw and print in 3d was always going to be fundamental to my residency, alongside a deep desire to integrate haptic mark making with digital processes, and to create hybrid works that speak of traditional printmaking as much as they do about the digital age we live in.
And of course, as it proved to be entirely impossible to settle on a single project, I decided to make a set of three interrelated editions, that might somehow work together as a singular whole. A trinity. Maelstrom Trinity.
Vessel / a reliquary for the Holocene. The first part of my trinity would turn out to be the most complex and difficult piece of work I’ve probably ever made. A 3d kiln fired glass sculpture comprised of eleven modular components, stacking and interlocking to create a tabletop piece around 50cm high.
I called the piece Vessel / a reliquary for the Holocene. At its core is a golden seed, a palimpsest for the idea of nature, the source of all plant life, natural, agricultural and horticultural.
Around the seed is a complex, futuristic glass case, a kind of seed pod, abstracted from natural forms, and designed to be seen as a kind of reliquary, a space to contain something of value and veneration.
My core practice over more than twenty years has revolved around the idea of drawing sculptural forms on CAD systems, with the expectation of outputting singular abstract views as editioned prints.
I love the idea of drawing in 3d, in the digital sphere, whilst simultaneously working haptically with line, colour and inked prints in the studio. It’s a cohesive space to progress ideas in. But for Vessel it quickly became apparent that the work should be produced as a 3d edition; printed at the CFPR as a digital maquette, and then cast into glass using the lost wax process with refractory moulds; to create a work filled with life and light; something that speaks to the timeless qualities of glass, whilst also using complex digital sculpting techniques to create an object that couldn’t have been made in the pre digital era.
For me, it’s really important to use tools that are of this moment and make works that look forward, but also evidence our time. I think engaging art almost always does that, providing us with a reflection of ourselves, perhaps that’s why the history of art, and the progress it depicts, is so compelling.
With the seed and carapace in development, albeit subject to multiple iterations, I started scratching around for a solid base for the piece and stumbled across the idea of using a rock from my own garden. Thinking about the studio as a moment in space and time is core to my interest, so it seemed entirely right to incorporate material from my own home into the final work.
The rock has been scanned, digitally sculpted, and output as a 3d print in PLA, to be set in refractory plaster, burnt out and cast into glass. The rock plinth alludes to the history of the Bonsai, and the way the trees can often be seen positioned on a rocky outcrop, which in itself references the natural world, and in particular the Yellow Mountains in China. A reference that correlates the sculpture with the brush and ink work of the second part of the trinity, Capsule.
There is literally no way I could’ve embarked on a project of this scale and complexity outside the residency programme, which has gifted me incredible access to the knowledge and experience of the team here. Notably Dr Angela Thwaites, a research associate and celebrated British glass maker, who endeavoured to teach me everything I would need to know to create a glass object from a digital maquette. The digital and material knowledge of Sonny Lightfoot and Mike White has also made accessing the centre’s technology possible, from 3d scanners and cameras to laser cutters and rapid prototypers; allowing me to explore ways of making that have been totally transformative for my ongoing practice.
Capsule. Alongside the glasswork, I wanted to make a set of photopolymer etchings. My practice is often concerned with what is gained and what is lost in the transition from the digital to the material, and vice versa, and photopolymer etching provides a beautiful canvas for that dialogue.
I decided to create a series of haptic ink studies using laser cut perspex combs, to produce parallel lines drawn out across a glass surface. Lines which were then photographed at high resolution, processed digitally and mapped onto a set of six new 3d drawings that would talk about nature using sculpted form and line.
In a sense these are simple, minimalist studies traditionally delineated with hand drawn marks. I often marvel at the way artists have historically used brush and inkwork to make beautiful, loose studies using simple but powerful gestural strokes. It’s that energy, juxtaposed with tight digital control and editing, that I wanted to capture in these new etchings. What makes them different is the way the linework is mapped into 3d, utilising CAD technology to render the lines in ways that couldn’t be realised in the pre digital era.
The drawings were then output to film ready for etching. Where a digital print can on occasion be almost clinically precise, a hand inked photopolymer etching, by its nature, brings warmth and the haptic to the finished work. Guided by Laura Clark Oaten, one of the CFPR’s expert printmakers, we were able to transform the final studies into something altogether more engaging than the digital images could be. I love the combination of loose drawing, the edit and the digital coming together in a single contemporary etching. That seems to me to progress the traditional method for creating work into a new and highly engaging space.
I wanted to pick up on the idea of the reliquary in the etchings too, to imbue them with some sense that these are drawings with some reverence for their subject, nature. So, we added gilded motifs by screen printing areas of size onto the paper, and then applying fine gold leaf using the traditional technique that has been handed down over the centuries. To my eye gilding reinforces the concept of the value of a printed image, evoking the history of the illuminated manuscript, the icon and all the other art forms in which gold brings a rich extra layer to add life and light to the surface of a work.
Rock / Singularity. To complete the trinity, I wanted to make a piece that spoke about the larger whole, our planet, and with that in mind set about experimenting with pigments and circular forms.
But in fact, as work progressed, I began to realise that the rock I had scanned for the base of my Vessel piece had its own highly aesthetic qualities, and could be used in its own right as a kind of metaphor.
I coloured up the 3d scans on system and chose several views of the rock to be used in a high chroma image with a gold background, a kind of secular icon for our time. I like the idea that the rock is simultaneously beautifully coloured but also totally barren. Perhaps that dichotomy lies at the heart of our dilemma regarding the climate crisis, and the changes we may need to start thinking about in order to mitigate the situation we find ourselves in.
I called this third edition Rock / Singularity. The singularity is a hypothetical moment in time when artificial intelligence and other technologies have become so advanced that humanity undergoes a dramatic and irreversible change.
There’s some fascination with where we are now, on the verge of an AI revolution. The significant amount of tech that I’ve used to create these rock images both in 2 and 3d seems to me to create a rather lovely juxtaposition between something very hi tech and lab based, the digital, and something resolutely of this earth, the rock.
I like the somewhat absurdist notion that the tech at our disposal may be used to study something as unyielding as a piece of rock. There’s something a little ridiculous there, and I remain pretty sure that an AI algorithm won’t ever make this kind of work. We’ll see.
To date, or at least since my student days, I’ve tended to make works that operate in broadly abstract terms and kept my political and environmental concerns to myself, so it’s been an interesting and educational experience to make works that perhaps contain a more overt narrative, for those who choose to read them in that way.
Of course art is and always will be open to multiple interpretations, and I love that about it. There’s a suggestion that art inhabits the space between the displayed work and the viewer. That space and the energy it contains, as light bounces from the work to the eye, may be where the art happens, where it’s projected, interpreted and hopefully enjoyed.
CFPR. By way of an addendum I would like to thank Professor Carinna Parraman for the amazing opportunities the CFPR has made available during the residency. It’s been a life affirming time, and a real pleasure to engage with so many new technologies and ways of making.
The CFPR is a true centre of excellence and as such a hugely valuable research space and resource for the UK. In some ways I think it evokes much of the original spirit of the Glasgow School of Art, the Bauhaus and the Black Mountain College, places where the intrinsic value of art as a key component in design for engineering, architecture and manufacturing was enshrined. I love the idea of art and design enhancing our lives. It’s what I trained to do.x.
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The Centre for Print Research >
University of the West of England.