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.
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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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February 2018
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