Mirror Image: Prints and Plates

MIRROR E GA M I PRINTS AND PLATES

COVER IMAGE Carolyn McKenzie-Craig

By Line as the Fall Ascends—We Float (detail)

MIRROR IMAGE: PRINTS AND PLATES 28 April –13 June 2015 Gympie Regional Gallery 39 Nash Street, Gympie

MIRROR E GA M I PRINTS AND PLATES

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THE MEANING OF THE MATRIX This exhibition features a selection of prints alongside the plates, blocks, or stones from which they were generated.1 Although it is uncommon to reveal the source or plate when exhibiting prints, such a strategy can be illuminating, as demonstrated by the recent Chuck Close: Prints, Process and Collaboration (2015) exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney.2 Terminology related to the art of printmaking can be arcane and inherently ambiguous. For example, the term ‘print’ is commonly used to refer to both the collective sense of an edition and the individual examples that comprise it. In printmaking, what secures this notion of a work of art with multiple instances or manifestations is the expectation that the prints are produced by the same author using the same process type; that is, a plate or matrix.3 Today, the generic term ‘matrix’ is often used to refer to the plate, block, stone, screen, negative, or stencil that generates the printed image. Interestingly, this term has not yet been adopted for the memory cards or data files that carry the binary code for digital prints, despite the fact that the mathematical definition of ‘matrix’ as a numeric array would seem a perfect descriptive fit.

Even though the earliest printed images in the European tradition were woodcuts, any reflection on the relationship between print and matrix must always begin with copper plates, for it was the intaglio processes of engraving and etching that shaped the consciousness or understanding of the world in early modern Europe. In fact, the scope, sophistication, and authority of the printed image were fundamental expressions of the technological dominance of Western Europe during the period of the so-called Enlightenment, which lasted from roughly 1650 to 1800. This era was heralded in the previous century by artistic giants such as Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) and Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) who built their

reputations on the dissemination of original prints as well as reproductions of their paintings.4 The French Revolution is usually used to denote the end of the Enlightenment, and it is worth mentioning a seemingly minor historical incident that occurred during the French Revolutionary Wars, since it had significant repercussions. In 1799, a British naval squadron commanded by Thomas Troubridge captured an armed French brig that had slipped out of Rome en route to Paris. The intercept proved to be fortuitous for all involved, since the two brothers who had contracted the French vessel, Francesco and Pietro, had their father’s inheritance in the hold. This was a cargo not only more valuable than gold bullion but also something that transcended the vicissitudes of wars between kingdoms or nations: the etching plates of their father, Giovanni Piranesi (1720–1778).

Piranesi was a name that every educated person in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century would instantly recognise. Commander Troubridge escorted the ship to Paris and ensured the French authorities respected the brothers’ rights to their bequest. His actions guaranteed that the Piranesi brothers could re-establish their print shop and publishing business with more than a thousand etched copper plates by their father. For his efforts, Tourbridge received a full set of Piranesi’s etchings.5 Many of Piranesi’s large copper plates were deeply etched and therefore already published in large edition sizes, in some cases in the thousands. This did not deter the family or inheritors continuing to print from the plates for the next 150 years in spite of the increasing diminution of print quality. As a result, the world is awash with Piranesi etchings. Using the Internet as a guide, one source claims that there are now “probably more ‘Piranesi’ prints in existence than those by any other artist”.6 This is not the only tale of precious copper plates and posthumous printings familiar to most printmakers

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and collectors. In 1803, Francisco de Goya (1746– 1828) exchanged the eighty etching plates of his Los Caprichos series for a pension for his son from Charles IV. Between 1881 and 1886, twelve editions of this series were printed, some with up to 600 impressions. Goya never printed a set of his large copper plates known as The Disparates, which were left packed in a crate after his death. These were first published in 1864 by the Academy of San Fernando in Madrid under the title Los Proverbios, and subsequent editions followed. His famous series of etchings Disasters of War were also only posthumously published, first appearing in 1863. The 1937 edition of this series, using steel-faced plates, became a focus of much interest in 2003 when the Chapman Brothers exhibited one of two sets they had purchased some years earlier. They had reworked the prints with additions; namely, clown and puppy faces for the depicted victims.

Unfortunately, the above and other such accounts of the printing plate tend to elide its obvious purpose as a generator of multiple images of the artist’s vision by instead emphasising its status as a matrix for income generation. The link between the magnitude of an edition and the degeneration of quality easily justifies the collector’s desire for rarity in a printed image by limiting an edition. This undoubtedly played a significant role in shaping the practice and attitudes of twentieth-century printmakers and collectors. It was not unusual for print collectors to privilege the first or at least one of the early numbers in an edition, with the assumption that the closer to the ‘singular reflection’ of the plate, the better the print. It was also common in the twentieth century to cross plates or blocks after the completion of an edition to ensure the integrity of the edition number.7 Since 1986, many states in the USA have legislated against printmakers striking unauthorised editions or selling prints outside of the designated edition. These consumer protection laws clearly support an economically

viable print community by giving legal security to the print collector. A different situation existed in France when the Piranesi brothers set up shop in Paris, for it was the printmaker’s authorial rights that required protecting. It wasn’t until the seventeenth century that “copperplate printmaking was elevated to a liberal profession in France” and printmakers were granted rights to publish with legal protection against unauthorised copying.8 William Hogarth (1697–1764) would obtain similar legislated copyright for his prints in England in the eighteenth century.

Francesco Piranesi was a skilled etcher himself, and he could publish his own images and those he printed from his father’s refreshed plates with some degree of protection. We might imagine today that the Piranesi brand is located in the copperplate, and the quality of the print can be measured against the indexical relationship to the print—the quality of the replication or the skill demonstrated in the replication process. However, for the seventeenth-century audience, the copperplate was more than a matrix.

It was seen as a concentration of Piranesi’s genius since the printed image was not a simple mirror image of the plate, but an indexical representation of the wonder of a Roman ruin, the horror of a gigantic prison, or an archaeological discovery. Christopher Wood has postulated that from the fifteenth century in Europe, the “wooden block or copperplate was readily taken as an authoritative index of something in the world”, such as a geographic fact, prodigy, or wonder.9 In other words, the mechanical process of engraving or etching the image on the plate acted as a kind of magical substitution process that closed the gap between source and printed image and thereby secured its authority as a direct link to the artist’s perception. As Wood notes, we are only familiar with the psychological effect of this substitutional paradigm today when we transfer automatic authority to printed newspapers, television news broadcasts, and, less reliably, Internet sources.

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This authority or special authenticity accorded to the print in early modern Europe may have been due to a combination of its categorical weight as a published document and belief in a direct or mystical transfer of object to printed image.10 However, any mystique in this process was not based on ignorance of the processes of etching or engraving; on the contrary, most educated or literate audiences were well aware of the mechanics of copperplate printing. In fact, prints played such a significant role in art, education, philosophy, and science that seventeenth-century printmaking technologies became powerful defining metaphors for cognition, perception, and memory.

As William MacGregor has demonstrated, the mind was often imagined or described as resembling “an engraved copper plate or a sheet of paper imprinted with figures”.11 It seems illogical, then, that while viewers were intimate with the process of engraving or etching a copper plate, they were also able to examine a print on paper and only ‘see’ the object represented. The plate (the matrix) became not a metaphoric mirror, but a window through which to see (the object). Today, most of us experience something of this paradoxical act of eliding the processes involved in the production of images through the moving image. While we are aware of the complex mechanics of film production, it does not impede our complete immersion in the reality of a film on a screen.

In fact, the more you know about film production, the deeper is your appreciation of any film. So it is with prints. This also explains why ‘magical’ is not an adequate term to describe the substitution process enacted by the matrix in creating a print, since the success of the magician’s craft is absolutely dependent on eliding the process. Furthermore, this perceptual or interpretive paradox might explain our suspicion of the digital print and our reluctance to recognise the binary code as a ‘matrix’, given that it seems more closely affiliated to the magician’s sleight

of hand or technical wizardry than the legacy of Piranesi or Goya.

The web is not awash with Piranesi prints but with proxies that manifest as computer, smartphone, or tablet screen images. When we view these surrogates, it is impossible to appreciate them as prints, since we cannot see and experience the physical geography of their surface, which is the trace of the matrix that secures the authority of the image. Any potential for a sensual interaction where countless lightly hatched or deeply bitten lines take on significance as determined marks carrying autographic as well as mimetic or symbolic significance is lost in the translation of print to electronic bits or binary code.

This is not at all to suggest that a digital print or screen image sourced from the Internet is not a work of art. A Piranesi print, for example, makes particular demands, and “the beholder becomes physically and intellectually conscious of exploring a dense, uneven and composite surface”.12 The resulting personalised experience is “unlike the illusion of completeness falsely presented by supposedly ‘limitless’ data bases (which really are largely predetermined by the parameters of a concealed computer program)”.13 The majority of images we interact with today are digitally generated on a screen. Thus, looking at a print and its corresponding matrix can only help us understand the difference between material illusion and featureless delusion in our negotiation of these powerful contemporary images that conceal the matrix of their electronic generation.

Ross Woodrow Curator, Mirror Image: Prints and Plates

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The exception is Ryan Presley’s Western Script (2014), a poplar woodblock, which is exhibited without an accompanying print. No prints exist from this block, and the gilded surface now eliminates functionality at the same time as enhancing the independent status of this block as a unique work of art.

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Chuck Close: Prints, Process and Collaboration, MCA, Sydney, 20 November 2014–15 March 2015.

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I’m not entering the inevitably tendentious discussions around the need for each print in an edition to be exact replicas or otherwise and the status of prints outside of editions. A recent otherwise numbing philosophical example of such a debate attempting to define the status of prints outside a designated edition supports the notion that prints from the same ‘plate’ are works of art regardless of other factors; see Christy Mag Uidhir, “Unlimited Additions to Limited Editions,” Contemporary Aesthetics 7 (2009), http://www. contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article. php?articleID=527. Most recently, in a study based around the Chapman brothers reworking of Goya’s 1937 Disasters of War etchings, K. E. Gover notes: “The ontological structure of fine art prints is often understood as a type-token relation. This puts prints in the same category as other art forms in which the work is instantiated by its tokens, such as music, dance, film, and literature. The reason why prints are understood as tokens is that each impression within an edition counts equally as an instantiation of the work.” K. E. Gover, “Are All Multiples the Same? The Problematic Nature of the Limited Edition,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 73, no. 1 (Winter 2015): 69.

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This was of course in contradiction to Walter Benjamin’s famous proposition that mechanical reproduction negates the ‘aura’ of the original work of art.

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Colin Holden, “The Eclipsed Son Francesco Piranesi and the First Paris Edition of the Works of Giovanni Battista Piranesi,” University of Melbourne Collections, issue 11 (December 2012): 3.

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Heather Hyde Minor, “Designing Piranesi,” Eighteenth-Century Life 34, no. 3 (Fall 2010): 36.

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The practice of closing out any possibility for future editions can of course be done with far less aesthetic brutality than crossing the plate as seen with the small hole drilled in the large copper plates in the recent Chuck Close exhibition.

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William B. MacGregor, “The Authority of Prints: An Early Modern Perspective,” Art History 22 no. 3 (September 1999): 401.

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Christopher S. Wood, Forgery, Replica, Fiction: Temporalities of German Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 40.

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MacGregor, “The Authority of Prints,” 393.

MacGregor and others have noted the significance of a seal of wax imprinted with an official endorsement of a sovereign, a pope, or their delegate in giving power to a document.

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Ibid., 411.

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Barbara Maria Stafford, “Think Again: The Intellectual Side of Images,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 20 June 1997, B7.

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Ibid.

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RUSSELL CRAIG born Melbourne, 1953

These four coloured lithographic works are printed from two key images and separate background colours. The key images were drawn and printed on lithographic limestone, while the background colours were printed using aluminum lithographic plates. The four different colour combinations repeat and mirror the two key images. This process helps to magnify the intensity of colour and energy that visually communicates the idea of nuclear energy. An efficient proposal for power, nuclear energy can provide for heat and electricity, and, for many countries, it is the best alternative for generating power. Like many highly advanced societies, Japan has several nuclear facilities. It would appear many are poorly planned and do not hold up well when affected by a natural disaster.

On 11 March 2011, a devastating earthquake measuring 9.0 on the Richter scale hit Japan, resulting in a colossal tsunami.

The catastrophe claimed nearly 16,000 lives, injured 6,000, and destroyed or damaged countless buildings. The tsunami debris also travelled as far as American and Canadian shores. Above all, this natural disaster highlighted the price we pay for building nuclear facilities without due consideration to naturally occurring catastrophic events. When hit with the 2011 tsunami, the poor design and planning of the Fukushima nuclear reactor caused the fallout from the Fukushima nuclear meltdown. This event has affected many aspects of our natural world.

The four eroded images of two ceramic sake bottles reference the dichotomy between Japan’s dependence on nuclear power and its attempt to maintain traditional values, including the culture’s appreciation of and respect for nature. Many countries are faced with the dilemma of harnessing and utilising an energy source for a modern lifestyle while at the same time attempting to preserve and protect their natural environment.

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TOP Lithographic aluminium plate, 102 x 61cm Photographer: Mick Richards BOTTOM Lithographic stone, 71 x 56cm

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LEFT Fukushima, From Stone to Dust (Purple) 2014 Colour lithograph on Magnani paper Image size: 36 x 25cm Paper size: 50 x 33.5cm Edition 1/5 Printed by the artist at QCA Print Studios RIGHT Fukushima, From Stone to Dust (Pink) 2014 Colour lithograph on Magnani paper Image size: 36 x 25cm Paper size: 50 x 33.5cm Edition 6/6 Printed by the artist at QCA Print Studios

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LEFT Fukushima, From Stone to Dust (Blue) 2014 Colour lithograph on Magnani paper Image size: 35 x 24cm Paper size: 50 x 33.5cm Edition 4/6 Printed by the artist at QCA Print Studios RIGHT Fukushima, From Stone to Dust (Light Blue) 2014 Colour lithograph on Magnani paper Image size: 35 x 24cm Paper size: 50 x 33.5cm Edition 4/5 Printed by the artist at QCA Print Studios

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CLAUDIA HUSBAND born Brisbane, 1992

I manipulate printmaking and drawing mediums through a detailed exploration of material and mark making in order to directly respond to my environment. This is manifested through a portfolio of imagery, ranging from expressive landscapes to macro-vision images of surface textures and detail. The selected range of works for Mirror Image engages my fascination with marble varieties, inciting a detailed study of the surface of rocks.

On Matrices In lithography, perhaps more so than in most print mediums, printmakers maintain a strong relationship to the matrix throughout the entire plate- and printmaking process. The preparation of the matrix itself can be brief (particularly with aluminium matrices), and the direct image-making process allows not only for a more intimate rapport between hand and surface, but also greater spontaneity in the way the drawing can be produced. The processing of the image can also be quick, which means that multiple matrices could be made and processed within a relatively short period of time.

Despite this, the processing that the matrix endures after drawing in order to maintain the image is precise and controlled.

Extreme care is taken to ensure that the drawing and matrix are both protected so that a good impression can be taken onto paper during the final printing stage. The drawing—and indeed the matrix itself—becomes fragile and vulnerable, and any mishandling of the surface may injure the image.

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TOP Void 2014 Aquatint etching 35 x 29.5cm BOTTOM Matrix: Zinc plate Photographer: Mick Richards

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ABOVE Marble Lines II 2014 Etching and aquatint 25 x 25cm

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TOP AND BOTTOM Matrices: Two copper plates Photographer: Mick Richards

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ABOVE LEFT Still 2014 Lithograph 43 x 51cm ABOVE RIGHT Matrix: Aluminium plate Photographer: Mick Richards

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TOP Calacatta 2015 Lithograph, 43 x 51cm BOTTOM Matrix: Aluminum lithographic plate Photographer: Mick Richards

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DAVID JONES born Cairns, 1969

When a person first encounters an etching and understands it to be a print, the question of ‘where the original artwork is’ often arises. I believe that this original artwork the viewer wishes to see is spread across the entire printed edition, and originates in the reverse image etched into the metal matrix of the etching plate.

The original, then, is suspended between multiple ‘places’ and one theoretical ‘space’. Comprehending the matrix and print together reveals the print’s origin of sorts, notwithstanding the mind of the artist and hands of the printmaker. The original is thus a mirror image of the work comprehended by the viewer, usually sitting outside the viewer’s ken. This exhibition brings together the seen and normally unseen, expanding the understanding of where that original work is.

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ABOVE LEFT FAR LEFT Turtleboy (2014) Magnani Incisioni rag paper, copper plate etching, printed using intaglio technique 100 x 70cm Edition: TP1 (Trial Proof 1), No edition entered into as yet Printed by the artist at Turtleboy Studio, Brisbane

Otherwhere (2004) Magnani Incisioni rag paper, multiple zinc etching plates, printed using intaglio technique, MDF covers, ink and turpentine-released text 70 x 50 x 2.5cm Edition: 1 book Printed by the artist at QCA Print Studios

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ABOVE RIGHT

Matrix: Copper plate, 70 x 55cm Photographer: Mick Richards

Matrix: Zinc plates, variable dimensions Photographer: Mick Richards

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CAROLYN MCKENZIE-CRAIG born Sydney

The mirrored reversal of the etching plate disrupts my impetus for control.

Logic is reversed in the beauty of its reproductive potential.

The authentic work touched by the artist—the matrix—is relegated to a conceptual position between gesture and meaning, while the trace (the paper print) takes on the value of authenticity and exists within its multiplicities as a democratising of the visual and textual canons.

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LEFT

By Line as the Fall Ascends—We Float 2015 Etching on Hahnamühle paper With text release on Iwaki paper (chine-collé) Paper size: 52 x 81cm Image size: 29 x 50cm Edition 5/20 Printed by the artist at QCA Print Studios RIGHT Matrix: Copper plate Photographer: Mick Richards

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LEFT

By Line—In the End There Is Nothing 2015 Etching on Hahnamühle paper, with text release on Iwaki paper (chine-collé) Image size: 29 x 50cm Paper size: 52 x 81cm Edition 5/20 Printed by the artist at QCA Print Studios RIGHT Matrix: Copper plate Photographer: Mick Richards

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LEFT

By Line—Between Moments and Gestures Lies Action 2015 Etching on Hahnamühle paper, with text release on Iwaki paper (chine-collé) Image size: 29 x 50cm Paper size: 52 x 81cm Printed by the artist at QCA Print Studios Edition 3/20 RIGHT Matrix: Copper plate Photographer: Mick Richards

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TIM MOSELY born Melbourne, 1961

When mechanically reproducing an artwork, a printer must master the material matrix to achieve an accurate representation of that artwork. It generally reduces the distance between an artwork and its copy to achieve a high-quality reproduction.

By contrast, when I make prints, I value the extended distance between the thinking and printing that copper plates, wood- or lino-blocks can generate. Having found these extended spaces a rich resource for my creative practice, the act of printmaking also consistently provides me with tools to extend them. I cannot see into these spaces and I choose not to try and master them. Rather, I haptically and emotionally feel my way through them.

These images are the outcome of creative practice in such spaces; they are not reproductions. The plates used to make them may be used to generate more than one image; however, more often than not, I find myself altering the plates throughout the course of printing from them. Altering them further extends the fertile space between thinking and printing.

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ABOVE LEFT FAR LEFT the needles pinch (detail) 2014 Recycled rainforest plywood print on Awagami Kozo paper Image size: 90 x 70cm Printed by the artist at QCA Print Studios

materialising my fear 2014 Varnish of alcohol aquatint on copper bleed printed onto Hahnem端hle paper Image size: 34 x 25cm Edition: Variable edition of 4 Printed by the artist at QCA Print Studios

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ABOVE RIGHT

Matrix: Rainforest plywood, 120 x 90cm Photographer: Mick Richards

Matrix: Copper plate, 34 x 25cm Photographer: Mick Richards

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RYAN PRESLEY born Alice Springs, 1987

I see printmaking as a useful apparatus through which to funnel my drawings. I use drawing as a cornerstone to all my ventures in art-making. As a medium, linocut offers a good opportunity to plan and revise drawings on the block itself and then flesh them out through the printmaking process, allowing them to be multiplied and further stylised through the behaviour of the inks, paper, and the colour (ink) and white (paper) dichotomy.

The carving process involved also allows the block to begin to have its own unique character, showing the organic process of physical force and laboured intervention. I believe that this has potential in the block becoming its own separate artwork, especially in the case of the woodblock. Through applying gold leaf, I have begun this experimentation, as seen in the works, The Golden Calf and Western Script, the latter of which has no prints made from the matrix.

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FAR LEFT The Crux: Set Sail over the Seven Seas 2009 Linocut on Magnani paper Image size: 40 x 30.2cm Edition of 10 Printed by the artist at QCA Print Studios LEFT Matrix: Linoleum, 40 x 30.2cm Photographer: Mick Richards ABOVE LEFT The Crux: The Hungry Land Grab 2009 Linocut on magnani paper Image size: 40 x 30.2cm Edition of 10 Printed by the artist at QCA Print Studios ABOVE RIGHT Matrix: Linoleum, 40 x 30.2cm Photographer: Mick Richards

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TOP The Good Shepherd 2014 Woodcut on Arches paper Image size: 21.9 x 91.8cm Edition of 3 Printed by the artist at QCA Print Studios BOTTOM Matrix: Woodblock, 21.9 x 91.8cm Photographer: Mick Richards

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ABOVE Western Script 2014 Poplar woodblock and gold leaf, 21.9 x 91.8cm Photographer: Mick Richards

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GLEN SKIEN born Nambour, 1959

From the very beginning of my interest in etching and drypoint, I was never conscious of regarding the metal plate as a matrix or template. I seem to have a similar regard for the plate as a painter has for their choice of support. At the completion of a print, one is left with two separate material forms but I have always maintained an equal affinity with the plate and its mirror image. I often feel that by making incisions into a metal surface—a sensory engagement—I connect with a certain primal response similar to the juvenile act of scratching one’s initials into the school desk.

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LEFT My Father’s Horse (v) 2014 Etching on paper 114 x 150cm Edition: 1/1 Printed by the artist at QCA Print Studios BELOW Matrices: Four zinc plates, each 57 x 75cm Photographer: Mick Richards

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JUDY WATSON born Mundubbera, 1959

BOTTOM RIGHT Heron Island Suite #8 2009 3 colour etchings on Hahnam端hle paper 50 x 35.5cm Edition of 30 Printed at BHE, Darwin by Basil Hall and Natasha Rowell; BHE chop Publishers Judy Watson and grahame galleries + editions TOP LEFT, TOP RIGHT AND BOTTOM LEFT Matrices: 3 zinc plates, each 24.5 x 19.5cm Plate 1: Brown Plate 2: Red brown Plate 3: Black Plates prepared by Judy Watson and Jonathan Tse at QCA Print Studios, Brisbane, and Dian Darmansjah at Djumbunji, Cairns

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ISBN: 978-1-922216-69-4 Author: Ross Woodrow Artists: Russell Craig Claudia Husband David Jones Carolyn McKenzie-Craig Tim Mosely Ryan Presley Glen Skien Judy Watson Editor: Evie Franzidis Catalogue designed at Liveworm Studio, South Bank.