SNU. "me 1986" monotype using plate as matrix, and chine colle using ghost print from monotype print 

SNU. Prints from "me 1986" plate showing first print, a la poupe print, print showing deterioration of plate.

  

SNU. Testing paints, crayons and ink on "Spain Years" print. "Spain Years" print, and altered "Jon" print.

  

SNU. Altered prints. 

 

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. 

SNU. CMYK photo etchings. CMYK and Magenta/Yellow Prints

ASU2. Prints for Jesus meets his mother. Intaglio on dry and wet paper. 

ASU2. Prints for Simon of Cyrene helps Jesus carry the Cross. Relief prints on dry and wet paper. 

ASU2. Doodle collagraph plates for Stations of the Cross depicting Simon of Cyrene helping Jesus carry the cross and Jesus meeting this mother. I have changed the viewpoint in this collection of collagraph plates which is not finished but goes to Veronica wipes the face of Jesus. Two plates i have left on my desk at uni i had shellacked them to see how that changed the way the card printed but did not have time to print them. And the others are also not printed, again lack of time. Our viewpoint changes our understanding and this leads into another project connected with shoes and walking in someone else's shoes. I have mentioned this earlier in connection to my SNU project little red shoe. The link between the two projects is understanding, understanding how one is always related to another. Isolation is perhaps a constructed space and our capacity to empathise and relate to another is what breaks both our own and others isolation.

ASU2. SNU I am in a bit of muddle now because some things physically follow each other but time wise do not. So the casting and visiting of churches to see representations of the stations of the cross overlapped with printmaking for both ASU2 and SNU and how to write that with out going all over the place i don't know. I guess this is why i've been asked to separate the two modules so that my markers are not having to untangle a mass of thread but have a clean line to look at. It is hard. 
It seems to make sense to follow the last images with the bronze cups but they didn't come till later as there was a wait, the investing and pouring. And during that wait. I printed some collagraph plates, that were really just doodles but came out quite nicely, for the Stations of the Cross ASU2 project. I had an idea that i wanted to make fourteen plates, at first i thought copper etchings, and then i decided to make them on old train tickets. In fact neither of these things happened as time ran out and covid19 hit. In the last week before lockdown i was able to cut to size (train ticket size) and cover with hard ground fourteen copper plates but i have not worked into them. I thought that i might make the train ticket collagraphs but my concentration was shot in the first few weeks of lockdown so i haven't had the time or mind space. Both these projects will happen but most likely not until next year perhaps in the run up to easter 2021. 
The prints that i made from the collagraph doodles were cut from chocolate bar card and printed on an off white paper with prussian blue ink using wet paper and dry paper one plate inked as relief and one as intaglio. Making these samples was preparation for printing the rail ticket collagraphs, how to ink and print and what images worked, and how to cut into the card to take some of the shiny surface off to create an image. Learning also that with printing you have to make the picture face the opposite way to the way that you want the print to be. This is a mind game. 
I also made plates of a photograph of myself at age 19. I had put in a proposal for one of the MA student-curator's exhibitions called self love and wanted to make a CMYK etching from this photograph to see how it differed from screen printing CMYK in look and process. I submitted a proposal which was about looking back at my teenage self with the kindness and love that was missing at the time. I wasn't sure i'd been accepted until i was invited to the artist's meeting. Unfortunately the curator decided my work did not fit with the vibe of her exhibition and messaged me to say so. I had had doubts too but was frustrated that she didn't look at the work before rejecting it. The rejection brought out a rather feisty side of me that was very much part of my teenage self's mode of protection. This feistiness also met with the Jesus story in quite a fun way. It allowed me to reconnect with a wanton rebelliousness that wasn't uncomfortable at all. 
The CMYK etchings involved going through the same process on photoshop as i'd gone though before with the screen print except that i only did half tone, as the comparison was not between two kinds of photoshop filters, but two kinds of print process. So then four plates were made and coated with photogravure ink and aquatinted and etched and then the  fun and games of setting up a jig and inking four plates simultaneously and printing them one after the other on the one piece of paper, held still by the press rollers, began. I made a set of all the colours combinations, my favourite being the magenta and yellow, as well three full prints in CMYK. I got good feedback from the print technicians which made my heart glow and felt nice for the teen me too. Going back in time I re-found parts of myself that had got buried and lost re-meeting teenage me, after years of mothering and other life had buried her deep, has given me access to parts of me cut off by responsibility and wanting to fit and be liked. 

ASU2. Prints from drypoint and hard ground scribble plates, worked into twice. Not finished. And note the faces are merely different types of face to distinguish between them. I'm looking at how a thing is seen from a different point of view. I haven't really seen in my head the faces of either character as i want to draw them. Next page is some scratchy drawings but not anything worked into. Do I see Jesus as more refined and Judas as rougher ? or the other way about ? it is all in the looking, the viewer, perspective, perception.

 

SNU. Prints. All of these prints are not great. The prints of me in the bath and the four girls, me and my sisters and our neighbours daughter are all bad, and the plates are not cut down. Later prints from these plates are from cut down plates but if it is likely i would have tried to remake these plates after learning how to aquatint properly. The roughness could be a feature but was not intended. The same problem seems to have happened with the Costa Dorada print tho' to a slightly lesser extent. I think maybe i put my plates into the aquatint box before the heavy dust had really settled but without technical support i can't say for sure that is what happened. 

SNU. Meanwhile. SNU. I had begun to look into my photograph albums because part of the desire behind my project was to place my relationship with Jon into context. I had a life before i knew him. And i hoped that giving him space on my life timeline would let me make peace with his death. I was aware that i was still angry with his family, his brother, his brother's wife and his ex-wife. I wanted to work out how much of that anger was justified and could rightly be laid at their door and how much of it was not. I needed to go back into my childhood because certainly the roots of my wound are born from my sisters' bullying, being socially excluded from games and told i was ugly and not good enough. If this happens often enough a child takes on this story as truth. I am not good enough. It was perhaps a bond between Jon and I that he also seemed to have this narrative running through his bloodstream. 
Delving into my photo albums i knew there were pictures i was looking for but also was seeing the pictures differently, as objects as much as images, as captured moments, the frames of the pictures also played a part in my choosing, and the stories maybe, the people yes, but also the physical context how it might look in a print. There were some i picked out that i was not able to make into plates as i'd wished, this is not just because of covid19 but because time and money were never going to allow me to do everything i wanted. But out of about dozen i picked six to work with not because they were better or more worthwhile but because they were the path i took. Initially I made three new photo etched plates. One was baby-me in a deep bath with bubbles, my mother's belly and hands at the side of the bath. My father must have been the photographer. On the edge of the bath are bath toys and cleaning products, the tiles are shiny, its a 1960's bathroom. The second was me and my sisters in a moment of interruption in a formal photographic session. Our neighbours daughter peeps over my shoulder and my middle sister's shoulder, her face against my sister's face which is still posed for the camera, I am looking down at a picture book, absorbed in the book not the action, my older sister is kneeling up, her face bright, eager and sweet. Out of all the other pictures in the series of shots that taken the interruption of the neighbour had obviously disrupted the family dynamic and briefly we are perhaps revealing more than when were sitting posed. The third photo my sons coming down some aeroplane steps. Its a picture known in the family as the "Spain Years" photograph, it's a package holiday picture, has a tacky cardboard frame, i think when we caught the plane home the photos were up on a board at the airport and you could buy the one of you arriving as you left. It has interesting details script and fashion and for my sons is a photo that acts as a prop to familiar comic banter. 
The prints from these pictures were unfortunately none of them great, inking and wiping technique maybe, but also perhaps a lack of skill with aquatinting. Something that came up later in the term and which is perhaps the biggest frustration at not having time to amend before lockdown. My plan on return to uni next term had been to practice aquatinting until i knew how to get it how i wanted it to be. Still i will post some images of the prints in the next blog post. Again i was sampling inks and papers when i made these prints. 

ASU2. In the same afternoon of the tutorial i let myself work with some mono printing ideas. I was trying to make a postcard for a charity auction and thought i had got something which when i tried it did not work. This happens. There is bad work and when it happens I thank heavens i am only an artist and not a brain surgeon or the president of the USA or even a hairdresser. If my work isn't good nobody's world will come to an end, the sky will not fall in. It is however frustrating and sometimes debilitating. It is ok if the bad run only lasts a little while, but if it goes on too long, a jigger of uncertainty sets in. Sometimes in this bit of time when nothing goes right it can feel like there is no point, the ugly work casts a dark pall over everything, later it may be that there are small ,nuggets of gold, or the beginning of something, but in that moment its hard to see. This happened that afternoon and it knocked my confidence for a few weeks. Later i discovered some little mono prints i had made thinking about the Pieta and i was quite pleased with them and ideas i tried out then came into play later, but that afternoon most of my work felt like dud work. I would like to do more mono printing to offset this knock. One afternoon of bad work is not a reason to not try again. Lets have a think about how that sits with the stations of the cross, Jesus falls for the first time. This stations of  the cross story could well be an allegory for life. There is a need to keep getting back up. And again there is a thread that connects my ASU2 with my SNU but again just thoughts building small bridges or asking for a short leap or a stretching of the imagination. 
In the same week the collaborative project group met to discuss ideas for a questionnaire to get information about people's attitudes towards homeless people. It was interesting working with the other students but not easy. I proffered the ask "what does home mean to you ?" i think if we are thinking about homelessness maybe that is a root question. 

SNU. Pictures made blank by Blogger post publication. They were two prints in Charbonnel etching ink; raw sepia and warm sepia; of a garden in Southwold printed on white Fabriano paper. Copyright belongs to me.  

SNU. Images made blank by Blogger. Copyright belongs to me. They are prints from copper plates showing examples of black inks on smooth white somerset satin paper. Images were of Jon, seated on the ground in front of a hedge and a garden in Southwold.  

SNU. Once the plates were made i set out to try all the black inks on the print workshop shelves to see how they compared. My background is in textiles and before that i did some ceramics and testing and sampling are key to my creative process. Again it is hidden learning, knowing my materials allows me to make an informed choice about what i need to use to get the result i want. The inks that I used were strong black, bone black, graphite black, soft black, drypoint black and velvet black. Each handled a little differently, lay on the plate differently, and subtle differences of colour and tone could be seen on the prints. I'm not sure how clear this is in the photographs of the prints. Later i tried two Charbonnel sepias; warm sepia and raw sepia. I also printed these plates with extender on two different papers but the prints are too subtle to show in a photograph. My intention was to work into one of these prints with a view to learning about hand colouring prints but time has not allowed me to do this. Another advantage to making all these sample prints was that repeating the process over and over again means my body now holds that memory. 

SNU. Acetates and etched plate ready for printing, note plate is the photograph reversed so that it prints as the photograph. 

SNU. Having got into the studios my first push to work was taking photos i hoped to work with, and putting them into photoshop so i could play with them to greyscale them and accentuate the blacks and whites to make them better for making acetates for putting onto copper plates coated with a photochromic ink and also for putting onto screens for screen printing. 
I had a picture of Jon which i chose because it was the whole of him. Using photographs to make my etching plates allowed me to look with new eyes at my photographs, to view a picture as someone unconnected to the story and to see what drew my attention, held my gaze, was distracting, amusing, frustrating, divine, it gave me information about composition, what makes a picture work, what makes it worth a second look. This was/is valuable information, it is what i call hidden learning. 
I have mentioned in previous blogs how working with pictures of myself made me see my image as an object, this happened too with my Jon pictures. It made me sad and unsure, i wondered if i was being exploitative even though the intention behind working with his picture and my feelings about him was to give him place in my life, a belonging that felt important, was it alright to do that ? And it was strange having his photograph in the studios at university. It may sound weird but giving him presence there was both comforting and uncomfortable simultaneously, it is funny how opposing feelings exist as companions. The need to hold on and let go acting against each other. These contradictory feelings fed into my ASU2 project, the cross that Jesus bore being perhaps a metaphor for the swaying balance which is consciousness calling to us to constantly reweigh, reassess, rejig our values, notions, ideas and systemic patterns so as to keep them alive rather than dead weight, habitual. 
The picture of Jon that i used is one from our last holiday together. We have stopped in our walk and are taking a break, gazing over a view of fields, the sun is shining, a tractor in the distance is stacking bales of straw in a field of golden stubble. You can't see that in the picture. You can't see the rest of the walk either, can't hear the buzzards call, or the feel the fear when the farm dogs attacked us, or the relief of the trees in the woodland behind where we are taking pause. You can't know the conversations we had that holiday or any of the other details because you weren't there. All you see is a man, smiling, looking to the side, he has a roll up in one hand, the other hand holds his wrist, the time is a quarter to noon, he is stripped to his waist which means his tattoos on his upper arms are part visible. You don't know how it feels to be me to see those tattoos that were part of his skin, part of my waking with him for the time we were lovers. You don't know anything apart from what you see and what you project on to the image and so it is with all images. Is the power of an image its ability to draw the viewer, to give the viewer what they want to see, to allow a viewer to project their being on the picture ?
The other picture was chosen because of its weirdness, the statues, the chair, the wall, the house behind and the dogwood stems behind the wall. I chose it because it had meaning for me but also because its oddness conveyed the oddness of that day which being a return to soul place within a time in which i was so deep in grief i was more dead than alive. I may speak more about this in reference to an object made in a blog further along the line. For now perhaps i say that i chose to make this image one of my first plates and that i was planning to also make plates or perhaps screen prints from photographs of the statues but lockdown stopped that from happening. 
Also in this week i was looking at photographs i had taken of seagulls and planning to use them to make screens for screen prints. They were taken when my daughter and I visited the beach at Bray, nr Dublin, my daughter was feeding them chips and i was taking photographs. It was the weekend before my birthday in 2017. I returned to an email telling me that Jon had died. 

ASU2. SNU. I will begin at the beginning! I will begin at the beginning of the beginning of the two modules i need to submit. The two modules are called SNU and ASU2. My ASU2 module is built upon retelling the story of Jesus Christ's journey to the cross, known as the stations of the cross, in my head this also includes the story of his birth, and life, and the people who are part of his life story either because they have a relationship or because they are actors within the story i.e Veronica or Simon.. My SNU module began with a desire to give space in my life to Jon, who i loved, to give the time we spent together record because it was mostly unwitnessed, a between we-two experience, to give it place on the thread that is my life in the hope that acknowledging our time together would let me also acknowledge that his death was not the end of my life. I came to my MA hoping to learn how to tell stories using visual media, most specifically wanting to learn the basics of printmaking, to build rudimentary foundations that would act as a platform for learning after graduating, the year to date has been about picking up these skills from knowing little to nothing. 
In term one in RIPU i looked at objects and their meaning and how objects could hold a story. And in ASU1 i explored the story of Rama and Sita's love affair as described in the Ramayana. I used time in the print studios to begin to meet my materials, exploring papers, mark making on copper (sugar lift, soap ground, photo etching and soft ground), mono printing, inks, colour and layering. I also occupied some space in the 3d workshops working with objects being cast in metal using the burning out method (organic materials that get burned to nothing when the metal is poured into the cast. My aim in my second term was to keep learning about printmaking processes, and to learn how to make moulds of objects to extend my knowledge of casting materials. Also to cast objects in wax to use for metal casting using the same principal as the burning out method described above. I think this is called lost wax casting. I also wanted to find out more about working with the 3d printer in case it should be a tool i might need to use for my master's project. One of the things i had hoped to be able to do was to use this term to learn more about finishing objects cast in metal but unfortunately lockdown prevented that and all the wax objects i have made this term, apart from the origami bowls made at the beginning are unfinished, tho I was able to retrieve most of them from the workshop and saw them off their base cups using a hack saw in the week before the university closed. 
If i am to begin right at the beginning i have to go back to the christmas holidays because that is when the seeds of the stories i was planning to tell were planted. Having handed in, and recovered from the bewildering shock of the Conservatives winning the General Election, in the run up to christmas i began drawing, with a found rainbow pencil and and a brown pencil and an ordinary pencil, scribbles depicting the christmas story and christ on the cross, no more than doodles but allowing my hand to give my thoughts body. At the same time i was looking for a specific image of Jon that i knew i had on a memory stick and found several pictures of him i didn't realise i had, Jon in his garden, and mine, and others. It brought it home to me that i needed to give him physical space in my life. He is/was important to me, the love of life, and yet i had almost no pictures of him except on my computer so i scoured through what I had and picked one to make into a photo etching when term restarted. I also decided to make a companion print from a photo of a strange scene of two statues in a garden in Southwold that i took on my first visit to Southwold after he died. Southwold was one of our places so returning there was an important part of my grief process. 
When the university opened in the new year it wasn't possible to get into our studio spaces as our term1 work was still being marked so i spent time in the library looking for books and films that related to the themes i was exploring and also to printmaking. I discovered the film Hunger by Steve McQueen and watching his interview on the DVD extras about his process led me to leafing through the only book i could find on the library shelves devoted to his work, some of which was interesting, some less so. I also watched Shame which i found less good than Hunger. For me Hunger was a film i needed to watch again, Shame not so much. I also re-watched A Thousand Times Goodnight and Jesus of Montreal. And for the first time Stations of the Cross directed by Dietrich Bruggemann. I became interested in why people become to driven to die for a cause or their faith. I thought about the conflict of interests going on in the middle east especially the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. About land and territory and how Palestine was given to Israel by people who had no right to give it. I thought about how Israel has bitten chunks out of Palestine for decades now and wondered how i would respond to another party acting in that way towards me and what i considered to be mine. I found a book first published in the 1934 "In the Steps of the Master" by H.V Morton about the state of Palestine before WW2. I also looked at poets: R.S Thomas, Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Sharon Olds and others. 

Bibliography
Anderson, D E. R S Thomas: Poet of the Cross. https://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2011/04/20/r-s-thomas-poet-of-the-cross/8661/ (Accessed December 29th 2019)

A Thousand Times Good Night (2014) Directed by Erik Poppe [DVD]. Sweden: Arrow Films
Freidli, I (2012). Steve McQueen Works. Switzerland: Laurenz Foundation.
Hunger () Directed by Steve McQueen [DVD] 

Jesus of Montreal (1989) Directed by Denys Arcand [Film]. Canada: FremantleMedia. 
Lehoczky, E. Cartoonist Lynda Barry: Drawing "Has To Come Out Of Your Body" https://www.npr.org/2019/11/27/782921983/cartoonist-lynda-barry-drawing-has-to-come-out-of-your-body?fbclid=IwAR3tS5-0Z4WwSIwK9zcTVEwXeKelQcFmcv8OtaUoJVQdLLvavf3jniyXD48&t=1577682071685 (Accessed December 29th 2019)
Morton, H.V. (1934) In the Steps of the Master. London: Rich & Cowan Ltd.
Stations of the Cross () Directed by Dietrich Bruggemann [DVD]