Experimental Print Club Edition 5 proofed
For Edition 5, being posted back to back with Edition 4, I've made a new print of one of the best 'Systematic Variations' that I've been working on over the past couple of months.
For this Print Club edition, the work has been printed 'cut to colour' on Kodak metallic stock, and then 'tipped in' to a debossed sheet of handmade Somerset 100% cotton paper. I like the locality of the stock, and I think there's a certain interest in the idea of 'tipping in'. A little like the way colour plates used to be added to books before mass market colour printing really arrived. There's a lively contrast between the crisp clarity of the cut edge and the altogether more haptic debossed edge too.
I've written a few notes about the work for an upcoming newsletter, that may perhaps be of interest too...
Systematic variations / series A
Print Club Edition #5 is an experimental colour study, part of an ongoing series of work that explores the idea of building new images from series of selected, pre assembled structural components, and then varying these components both in the compilation and editing stages. Effectively using the system's tools to explore the broader potential of the original sculptural studies, and remixing them into a fluid sequence of variations.
There are many great historical examples of this approach delivering intriguing, often beautiful, results. The most obvious of which is probably the Goldberg Variations, written by Bach and published in 1741. In a sense, there’s an opportunity to redraw, reconsider, remix and recompile a series of components which can then be edited and manipulated in close to real time, a process that is in some ways analogous with a free form improvised performance, live in the moment, using dozens of carefully pre arranged studies (partial components).
This Print Club edition is one of the best variations from the initial series, and has at it’s core a newly drawn iteration of my Flow geometry, reprocessed onto a tessellated grid structure, and overlaid with a set of diamond, or harlequin, linear treatments that I hope bring the underlying line drawing to life.
The print itself is imaged onto Kodak metallic stock, and then ‘tipped in’ to a sheet of handmade Somerset paper, with a single mould made deckle edge at the base. I continue to find the contrast between the haptic, the analogue, the digital and the way the materiality of these elements can be combined, to be of real interest.
