ABOUT THE PROJECT

Print Making Thinking is a collaborative research project inviting researchers and practitioners across disciplines to explore the use of instruments in their work and the interconnectivity between making and thinking. Through three hands-on printmaking workshops, plus talks, discussions and a dedicated online forum, the project introduces a range of approaches to taking and making impressions, from the tried and tested to the experimental and ad-hoc.

“Whenever an instrument allows us to cultivate a new talent, the world becomes a different and more intriguing place a setting of even greater possibility.” (Nicholas Carr 2015)

How is the world changed for us by our use of instruments—the tools, equipment and apparatus we handle every day? As researchers, how does the praxis of holding and manipulating tools affect the way we understand and think about the research we do and insights we gain? What is the interaction between the grasp of the hand and the grasp of the mind, and how might forms of knowledge situated within the body or tool be acknowledged or recuperated through making?

Such interaction comes to the surface in the fine art and craft of printmaking, where hands and tools lead innovation as often as they follow it. Knowledge is recorded across the matrix and shared across a community of printers, artists, publishers and paper makers. Imprints are then created, with two forms, each with its own inherent history and characteristics, pressed together to yield new hybrid forms. This dynamic of making and sharing impressions is complex and multifarious, and opens the way to a conceptual conversation about how intellectual and practical insight is formed, and about how such insight is shared across the wider contemporary printmaking community, across institutions, and across disciplines.

Print Making Thinking is hosted by the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, and supported by the University of Oxford Humanities Department. The project has been developed in collaboration by artists Graeme Hughes and Tamarin Norwood, with contributors Daniel Clark, Alexandra Franklin, Weimin He, Yves Leather, Martin Morris, Stephen Stuart-Smith, Mike Taylor, David Tolley.

Contact graeme.hughes@network.rca.ac.uk