Day 7
Tuesday 27th August 2024
The aim for the last four days is to produce a piece of work. I had naively thought that by the end of the two weeks I would be walking away with a complete body of new work, this despite the more informed warnings of artist Michael Horsley who had told me that one or two pieces would be a more realistic target!
Being chosen to receive the bursary was based on the submission of a project proposal.
The Proposal
At college I have recently been focusing on the use of billboards as vehicles for promoting commodity fetishism, in other words how they create the illusion of need. Also, what happens to billboards when they are abandoned and therefore no longer fulfil the role they were designed and built for? The proposal for this bursary centred around a continued exploration of this using a combination of photographic images, text and mark making. Can anything be commodified?
Advertising and commodity fetishism is a political issue, as such the nature of the piece produced needs to address this in some way.
Stone Lithography – Creating a Piece
The two stones await me as I arrive at the studio.
I will attempt a two colour lithograph, with the image on the smaller stone being printed into the image of the larger stone. This will involve somehow (I haven’t worked this part out yet) a reasonable degree of registration so that the image on the smaller stone fits neatly into the space left for it in the larger stone.
Previous attempts at photo transfer, although aesthetically pleasing were a bit patchy. I therefore tried using a halftone image printed using a laser printer. A halftone image differs from a normal one in that it is made of tiny dots and therefore holds ink better. It is something I use a lot in screenprinting, so Paul suggested it might work better here too.
The image appears to transfer very well on to the smaller of the two stones.
On the larger stone I start to plan out a billboard and identify the area where ‘Our Lady of Pain’ will eventually go. Using a wax-free carbon paper, I mark it out (I think I have got the reflection aspects of the print the right way around!)
I do apply a tusche in white spirit border around my billboard. Experience shows that this is likely to go wrong, so at least being around the edge of the image is an attempt at damage limitation. The photograph below also shows part of ‘Our Lady of Pain’ masked off and the edge of the billboard drawn using litho crayons.
Large billboards are made from several sections of image stuck together, so I thought I would allude to this by creating a grid effect. This was done by dipping thin woollen thread in tusche solution and slapping it down on the stone.
Having carried out a first etch on the smaller stone, I inked it up and ran off a few prints to check its quality. Compared with those done in the previous week, these were significantly better. The half-toned image appears to have worked.
In preparation for tomorrow, the smaller stone was given its second etch and the larger stone with the billboard given its first etch.
Tomorrow, I will attempt to combine the two images using two different colours and hopefully also add some text.