RESEARCH EVENTS
Introductions
Where: Ruskin School of Art, 128 Bullingdon Rd, Oxford OX4 1QP
When: Thursday 7 December, 5:30-8pm
For this first event participants are invited to bring along a tool or other object you regularly handle as part of your working process, and speak briefly about how you use it. Following informal introductions, each object will be photographed by artist David Tolley, initiating our study of impression-making with light and lens. David will use still life photography as a transformative medium, making subtle manipulations of form, tone, texture and scale, and using lighting to create a controlled range of shadows, mid-tones and highlights that create a 3D impression on a 2D print or computer screen.
The project blog will also be introduced. The blog will capture insights that arise from the workshops, and participants will be encouraged to develop these insights by sharing reflections, images, links and references, generating a wealth of material that will inform our making processes and the resulting printed matter. It will also afford us an opportunity to consider how ideas, learning and teaching are affected by diverse sites of research and the transition between analogue and digital.
Workshop 1: ENFRAMING/PRINT/DRAWING
Where: Ruskin School of Art, 128 Bullingdon Rd, Oxford OX4 1QP
When: Saturday 20 January, 10am-5pm
This hands-on workshop examines the objects introduced at our first meeting. Lead by artists Martin Morris and Yves Leather we will explore how the hand, eye and mind interact with these objects through mark-making exercises that use life drawing and touchscreen technology to explore touch, control and scale. These exercises will introduce you to a range of techniques for preparing artwork for printmaking, and will produce materials and tools for Workshops 2 and 3.
Gestell, Heidegger’s word for the essence of technology, is usually translated into English as ’enframing’. At its most radical, technology does not designate a complex network of machines and activities, but the attitude towards reality which we assume when we are engaged in such activities; technology is the way reality discloses itself to us in contemporary times.
Slavoj Zizek, The Event (2014)
Workshop 2: RELIEF/PRINT/MAKING
Where: Ruskin School of Art, 128 Bullingdon Rd, Oxford OX4 1QP
When: Monday 5 February, 10:30am-5:30pm
MORNING – Stephen Stuart-Smith of Enitharmon Editions, Mike Taylor of Pauper’s Press and Alexandra Franklin of the Bodleian Libraries’ Centre for the Study of the Book each introduce their practices within fine art publishing, print making and letterpress. They will discuss the impact of print upon their work and reflect upon the range of collaborative relationships involved.
AFTERNOON – Hands-on relief printing workshop, printing from your plates and images created so far on the course. We will explore newer technologies used to engrave images into the matrix of the traditional woodblock process. This workshop is the beginning of the printed outcomes that participants will take away at the end of the project as a record of the developing research and making process.
Workshop 3: SOUND/PRINT/FORMING
Where: Ruskin School of Art, 128 Bullingdon Rd, Oxford OX4 1QP
When: Monday 19 February, 10am-5pm
MORNING – Talk by artist Daniel Clark, whose recent work inhabits the shared spaces of print and sound production techniques, whilst probing and expanding upon the slippages that occur between these traditional and contemporary modes of communication. With reference to projection, absorption, memory and potential obliteration, Daniel proposes that ‘The Printing Plate is a Wormhole’ through which we can dig into the folding strata of history, and examine our environment’s potential to be absorbed into, and projected from, the surface of a printing matrix.
AFTERNOON – Hands-on workshop lead by Daniel Clark, exploring his interdisciplinary engagement with print and sound through ‘visually accessed phonography’, acid-etched soundwaves, and the documentation of potentially volatile colophony clouds.