My dad is a modern day polymath! Along with being a genius with computers, blagging his way into an engineering degree and all on the crypto and IT security courses, he also spent part of his working life advising on engineering projects in Ireland. One such project was the salmon hatchery built at Ballyshannon, on the Erne River. Dad worked on detailed plans that eventual led to the creation of the site, and in homage to this fantastic achievement I decided to make a print as another result of his hard work. I took scans of his original plans from the 1970s, and adapted them into a salmon shape. The result, I hope, is a striking print and a celebration of the real world results of my dad's work. We both signed the final piece, as a collaboration.
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Through a course I was on at City Lit, I had the chance to try out some photo litho techniques. It was a great opportunity to see how I could capture more concrete textures from the Thamesmead Estate. It was a very different technique for me, and it took quite a while to get into the rhythm. Mixing this in with some chine collé was great, and it's a nice technique for picking out detail. Definitely some methods I'll be considering in the future.
I've been working a lot on experimenting with, and perfecting concrete canvases for printing. So it's a nice change of pace to instead go back to good old fashioned paper, and print some stone and concrete textures onto that medium. This is the start of a short series, based on textures I've photographed and copied from the Barbican Estate. Some of the surfaces, while made from concrete, are studded with other types of minerals to make them look more like stone or marble. The scale of the Barbican Estate is so awesome that it's easy to miss these fantastic quirky intricacies. I've tried to bear this out by using different gradations of grey, along with using tiny amounts of bright and bold colours to draw out the detail.
Continuing on from my previous work on Thamesmead, I wanted to further think about how we treat urban architecture and in particular, the social and political discussion of concrete as a building material. The tower blocks of Thamesmead are monuments to these tensions. In these prints, I used handmade concrete canvas and grey/black tones to blur the boundaries between architecture, atmosphere, and people. The prints work as a series or standalone, and I hope that they evoke questions about our relationship to materials and their use in social housing and urban environments.
Working more with the tiles that I've created, and inspired by the mosaics of Lisbon, I'm hoping to create more brutalist concrete pieces in the coming months. The first of these is a composite of the Barbican estate. These prints use abstract shapes and absences to create a fractured view of our perception of the estate and its use of concrete architecture. Printing onto these surfaces is a real challenge, but I'm excited to find more ways of using material to represent urban environments.
I had a lovely visit to Lisbon in February (despite a horrendous bout of food poisoning) and enjoyed the art, architecture and lifestyle. One of the highlights was a walk along the southern pier. It's an unusual stretch, full of abandoned factories and graffiti. To commemorate the trip and that nice walk, I created this print of a stark, unused crane at the water's edge, with the looming Ponte 25 de Abril suspension bridge.
Thamesmead is a strange place. Formerly on military land in south London, this estate was considered to be a huge solution to overcrowding issues in the 1960s, and an opportunity to create a Utopian community using state of the art architectural technology. The vast estate was cast in concrete and it wasn't long before social problems emerged, owing in large part to the complete lack of amenities, social infrastructure, and paucity of transport options. Today, the population of Thamesmead stands at around 30,000, and these people are living in the shadows of gang issues that wracked the estate in the 80s and 90s, along with the broken promises from private investment and the council. My visit earlier in the year was nothing but pleasant, bumping into nice people and enjoying some of the new green spaces and shopping structures. Thinking about how the perception of the concrete environment has changed since Thamesmead's construction, I wanted to capture a sense of tension around the promise of architectural plans and the reality of their construction. This print is a fractured view of two scenes at Thamesmead, put through different prisms to create a window into how we relate to modern architecture.
I've been working on some handmade concrete tiles on and off for the past few months, with the aim of creating an unusual canvas for printing. It's taken quite a lot of work to ensure a consistent, smooth surface (anything less would be impossible to screen print on without damaging equipment) to roll out project. I'm very happy with the progress and results, which use bright block colours to contrast and highlight the natural texture of the concrete. The abstraction of the geometric shapes and the construction material canvas is allowing me to keep questioning urban life and infrastructure. I'll have more designs and sizes of these tiles in the future, with buildings, facades and urban infrastructure featuring.
Crane #9 is a series of collages based on other handmade crane prints. I want to further question what it is to define our urban environment and to think about the process of urban planning at a micro, individual level. With this series, abstract shapes shift and move around the skeletal cranes, disrupting our efforts to order our environment and to take control of our urban existence. The series is a fun one to work on: collaging is very calming and satisfying! I've been working on this print - the second in a series on West London gardens - on and off for a few weeks and it's very satisfying to now have it finished. I moved away from the half-tone technique of the last garden print and instead, layered shadows with different shades of green and black. I think the result is a more vivid, lush garden which is enclosed by the stark bars of the gate and fence. It was one of those pieces that looks utterly bizarre while in progress, before the final layer went down to lock everything in. It's a 4 layer piece, one 300 gsm paper and I'm looking forward to developing this series more and think further on the influence of these spaces on urban planning and urban life. |
Tadhg CaffreyI'm an Irish printmaker, living in North London and focusing on urban landscape, construction and abstract geometry. My first name sounds like "tiger" without the last bit.
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