Output details

A Synthetic Grammar of Attrition

This research questions faith, reality, our relationship with the physical world and our reliance on the virtual. The enquiry culminated in a set of large-scale digital drawings printed onto semi-gloss photo paper that were selected and exhibited within the touring International Print Triennial shown in Poland, Germany and Austria. These exhibitions included over 100 influential Printmaking and Digital artists such as Mark Hampson and Jan Pamula.The drawings explore our faith in virtual and digital environments, combining imagery from religious painting, the internet, advertising and popular culture, and reassembles these elements to deliver synthetic visual adjuncts that compose a readable form from an over-saturated and ever expanding field of visual sources. The combination of the constructed objects with the virtual nature of the design process envisages the computer as a belief system, a place of infinite creative possibilities, augmented reality and intangible space. The methodology combined preliminary physical hand drawing with digital mouse controlled drawing, extending the language of Photoshop produced imagery, placing the resulting imagery between drawing, print, painting, graphics and photography, raising questions about how representation can change our reading of an image, and whether we put our faith in the virtual, the real or a representation of the real. Situated within the field of Printmaking, the research questions the perceived and established nature of Print and its relationships with layering and the surface of the paper. Where Printmaking traditionally builds up from the paper’s surface, this research intends to make the viewer perceive the image as below the surface, intangible. The surfaces of these digital drawings mimic the physicality of the computer screen, where the gloss of the photographic paper places a reflective barrier between the viewer and the re-invented object, to achieve a conflict of visual and physical information.