Rock / Singularity / EPC edition #25
Rock singularity is the latest work for my Experimental Print Club, and also a component of the work I’ve been making during my residency at the Centre for Print Research at UWE, here in Bristol.
I’ve been building a new kiln fired glass sculpture - Vessel, a reliquary for the Holocene - and as part of that work I wanted to create some form of base component to ground the modular sculpture.
So I thought it would be fitting to choose a rock from my own locality, my garden, and use it as a part of the support for Vessel. There’s a whole load of thinking there about the rock as a barren, weathered surface, and the reliquary that contains the germ of a seed being planted on it.
Image by Dong Shouping, Landscape of Huangshan Mountain
There's a long history and deep visual language around the idea of depicting rock in an image. I love the way a Bonsai tree is often positioned asymmetrically on a craggy piece of rock, a kind of maquette of the Yellow mountains, and all the history that goes with that way of thinking about the natural world.
I’ll write more about Vessel in my next post, but for now I'm attaching a link here to a CGI render of the work in progress that shows the modular nature of the construction.
Having selected a mid size, rather fabulous rock, I 3d scanned it at the CFPR. An amazing process that uses a series of black and white geometric projections to map the form and feed the resulting cloud point data back into the system.
Effectively the fluctuating levels of distortion in the black and white patterns being projected onto the rock allows the software to create a 3d map of the surface of the object.
Additionally RGB filters are used to create a colour map of the rock, and the whole is carefully stitched together to form a cloud data set with a vast quantity of individual nodes, that when rigged together create a 3d model of the object in question. As someone who has, up to now, always drawn my 3d models, it’s been quite a revelation!
What I perhaps wasn’t expecting is that the 3d scans themselves have some really beautiful aesthetic qualities. So in addition to using the model in my sculptural work, I thought I’d make a new print from the data set too.
I like the idea that the rock can be read as a planet form, and that it can, at least within its own virtual environment, float in space. As such the image that has come together for the print shows 3 rocks floating above a barren patch of soil. The third rock from the sun.
The sun is simply represented by the gold ink radiating across the sheet, whilst the soil or earth is printed on Somerset cotton rag, with the natural mould made deckle at the base. It was quite an interesting challenge to overprint coloured inks onto the deckled edge. I set each print up on a backing sheet, effectively allowing me to overprint the uneven edge, and in so doing create a kind of naturally broken line at the base of each edition.
There’s something really beautiful about the mould made edge on a piece of hand crafted paper, and I often choose to accentuate its beauty by using it in some active way in my print work. Often by cutting the other three sides of the print straight, to highlight the difference. The idea that the edge can also be inked with colour is a thought I'm going to pursue further!
I’ve laid a gold base behind the rocks, which of course alludes to any number of icons and altarpieces, favourites of mine would certainly include the Wilton diptych.
For the main image I’ve used Hahnemühle photo rag metallic, which has a brilliant textured surface, and contrasts beautifully with the Somerset base. The two pieces are handcut and joined together, a little haptic working amongst the digital techniques.
I like the idea that the rocks have become paint splattered, boldly coloured spartan objects floating on a gilded backdrop. There’s something faintly psychedelic there, and a little pagan too perhaps. The rock ties us in to our deep history, to neolithic making and beyond, and can be seen as representing our deep past, whilst the paint on it’s surface can be viewed as our world as it is today, a beautiful, colourful veneer.
There’s a lot more to be said about the place of the rock in art history, it may be seen as one of the most elemental of materials, and in the end may well be the longest surviving of all the media people have worked with over the centuries. There’s something deeply transformational about picking up something so routinely overlooked, brushing it off, and having a closer look at what lies beneath.
As an aside, there's a sensational lawn edge at Coleton Fishacre in Devon. If you're ever passing, it's well worth a visit. The line has been built up over decades, and rather than being straightened by an over zealous gardener, now snakes across the landscape there, defining the edge between the grass and the soil.
Rock / Singularity
The singularity, 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 in 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 absurd 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. It requires the kind of human mindset that I’m fairly confident computers will struggle to acquire.
The art world seems to be able to inhabit both these polarised positions, the digital and the haptic, quite effortlessly, and will no doubt continue to be transformed by the new opportunities in making that continue to manifest as we hurtle towards the singularity, as well as offer a rudder for the journey.
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If you’d like to add this edition to your collection, please do join my Print Club before the end of July, and I’ll post it out to you. After that, the edition will close, as all my Print Club editions do, and I’ll start work on the autumn edition, which should come out sometime in October I guess.
Thanks for reading this far, it's appreciated...
Best as ever,
Chuck Elliott
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