Time marches on and deadlines are getting tighter. The little book I'm publishing to document my residency is almost ready for the printers thanks to the wonderful Ruth. In between entertaining holidaying children I've managed to get a batch of rust prints over-printed with collagraphs that will hopefully dry in time to get to the framers...
Meanwhile, I'm waiting to hear when the BBC Look North feature will be aired (in the eastern part of the region I understand) and when the article in the Journal Magazine (a publication in Hull) will be out...
On any walk on the beach I pick things up, sometimes more actively than others. On my long walk last weekend I just collected feathers.
I've experimented with printing from these, having turned some of them into a collagraph plate. Their solid shafts mean that there is quite a difference in heights on the plate so a relief print using just rollered ink is patchy, but I love that uncertainty about what will print and what won't.
I've been developing some collagraph plates to print from. This is a slow process as things have to happen in the right order, with one layer or process being completed before the next. I'm working with two different ideas: one is to use collected items from the beach, glued onto a base; the other is to build up texture based on my drawings using collaged paper and stitch.
I'm experimenting with different types of found item: plastic fragments (which should make an interesting print but are not easy to glue down effectively), textile fragments (which glue down beautifully) and seaweed fragments (which glue down with mixed success).
At this stage things can look disappointingly boring but there is the hope that they will produce some really interesting textures and marks once printed.
Everything has to be sealed so that when it goes through the printing press with damp paper it all holds together. Some things also need a kind of primer to help stabilize them for when ink is applied. The gesso I use for this transforms the plates into ghostly versions of themselves (see the image at the top).
My hope is that I can use the textures to print onto both paper and fabric, the second of those to feed into the 'Spurn cloth' that is developing from the fabric dyed on site.
