I had the pleasure of visiting Newcastle back in October for the International Print Biennale. It was a real festival of print-making, with galleries across the city devoting their spaces to all sorts of printed material. This was a great opportunity to learn about different techniques and to submerge myself in the medium for a few days. One of the things that struck me most while exploring the (approximately 10!) spaces I visited as part of the exhibition was the variety of ways that artists used print, it's constraints and possibilities to enhance their work and create new expressions. Rather than printing something for the sake of it, each of these artists actively engaged with the technical aspects of the medium and embedded the process into the creation of the piece. Printing onto feathers, using collage and embossing techniques (below) and combining different media gives printmaking a vibrancy that I had not seen so clearly before this visit. The city is also lovely and when you have galleries like the Baltic showing fantastic films from Lithuanian artist Deimantas Narkevičius it adds up to a pretty inspirational visit! Lots of thinking and experimentation for me on the horizon as I hope to incoporate what I've learnt on that fantastic art trip!
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Crane #2 is based on some photographs I took this year in Gdańsk. It's a fantastic city and I really enjoyed exploring the shipyards and construction zones. For this print I wanted to combine hand-cut shapes and vectors to draw out some detail of the crane. I introduced these elements throughout the printing stages, changing the position and size of shapes and the opacity of inks as I completed each layer. I also introduced hand-drawn elements, using a lithograph crayon to create spots of rust. This is something I'll be exploring in the future, as I'm increasingly interested in how printmaking can recreate construction materials and textures. I'm also thinking about how these personal, unique and handmade elements hint at the difference between the machinery that changes our city and the citizens who live in that city.
I'm finding that the harsh, skeletal aesthetic of cranes and construction has an interesting counterpoint in the personalised, print-making process and I'm sure I'll be coming back to the creative goldmine of the Gdańsk shipyard soon! |
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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