SNU. Back to the blog spot/research file grind. I have been updating my website. More of that later. Putting my MA term 2 portfolio into slideshows that hopefully will give some kind of sense of what i've been doing this term along with this blog and the SNU essay.
Having left this blog a few days i will need to run around a little to try to pick up the thread that i've dropped but i think where i've got to is colour. And time back in the print studio. I think that i am at the point in my research where i am playing with the plates that i made of my sons coming down the stairs from an aeroplane, and my sisters and i and our neighbour, and me in a very deep bath with my mum holding on to me from the side. And also the plate of Jon. And two plates that i made from the same photograph of me in 1986 that i made the CMYK print from. One of the whole photo and one of the wallpaper.
I will begin with print of my sisters. I think that i am not very good at applying aquatint. I think that i put the plate into the box when the dust is still too thick. I had hoped after Easter to go back into the studio and practice this but lockdown put a stop to that. I will do it when i get back to university. It will be good to start the new term that way. I think that i am not very good at applying aquatint because the plate of me and my sisters, and me as a baby in the bath never printed well and began to get messy very quickly. As did the plate of me in 1986 which gave me only two prints before it was obvious that the darkest tones were perishing. I made eleven prints in all including three chine colle, three a la poupe, and two inked as mono type. At this point although the deterioration suited the image i chose to stop because the plate getting spent and i liked the plate as it was, slightly trashed. Copper print plates are kind of beautiful in themselves. The plate of my sons was also patchy. 
However the good thing about prints being poor quality is that they feel less precious. I wanted to experiment with ways to colour a print after it had been made. I tore up one of the prints of my sons into five pieces, keeping one as a control piece i worked into the print in different ways. I had hoped to do more of this over the Easter holidays but cataloguing my work for on-line hand in has taken up the time that i might have spent making work so i will do this over the summer. The piece that i liked was not coloured but drawn on with a fine rotring pen. i would like to do more of this. 
I also decided to scribble out my face on the picture of me and my sisters and neighbour. It felt like an act of violence. Later i made a viewfinder and explored how it felt if i cut out my sisters. Again it felt violent. One of the things i have been addressing as part of the emotional process of this project is my relationships to other people. I often felt unwanted as a child and to date i still struggle with this feeling. Taking myself out of the family picture was, after the initial shock, quite empowering. A choice to not be part of the picture rather than painful exclusion. Removing my sisters was also empowering, it reflected how i feel about them, separate, other. Addressing issues like social exclusion that are common and difficult make art useful. If i show my small print and one person sees it and understands then the work has done it's job.
There is a history of artists working over work, sometimes to make better a painting but sometimes an artist/artists use others work and make work over. Jake and Dinos Chapman did it with Goya prints and also a dot to dot book. I saw this work in exhibition some years back it was good, it was fun. Jenny Holzer redacted pieces of script, very pertinent to now tho she was making this work some years ago. And using packaging, and cutting and snipping, and working into old text, can all be effective and cathartic to do. Collage is something i want to explore further. The chine colle prints that i made feel like a beginning of a new creative path that i hope to explore over the next year using print as a part of the mix up and mash.  
The chine colle prints came about because I was working into the plate of "me 1986" with colour, being subtle at first, and then less so, until i stopped trying to be subtle and went wild with the colours that i'd mixed up, and painted the colour on to the plate with my finger, i took a ghost print of the first inked plate on tissue paper, and two ghosts from the second, these then all gave me opportunity to chine collie the last three prints that i made with the plate. Each of the chine colle prints was different. I have portfolio-ed my favourite on my website so will give a different one on here.