There's something unusual about petrol stations in major cities like London. Perhaps its their height - necessarily lower than all surrounding buildings for safety reasons - or their secret underground chambers coursing with fuel, or indeed, the fact that a modern city is one that should be striving towards a reduction in fossil fuel usage. London petrol stations are an anomaly, at odds with the city's green ambitions and rapid skyward expansion. For this print I wanted to highlight the weirdness of something we'd usually pass without considering. The grey half-tones of the background give the print a ghostly quality, questioning how long before these stations give-in to London's aesthetic and infrastructural changes.
0 Comments
This is a 5 layer print based on a petrol pump found in an abandoned service station in East London. I've used CMYK (and orange!) to break down the contours of the pump and give it a rust-like quality. In the print, the fuel is corroding the pump from the inside and this is bleeding out through the stark colour layers. This was another tough layer to register and line-up and the detail is very fine, at times just a single pixel. As a result there are differences between each print, but I feel this adds to the edition and further highlights the degradation of the pump from pristine condition to rotting and useless. |
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.
Instagram - tcaff.prints [email protected] Categories
All
Archives
February 2018
|