Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
University of Northampton
Staub (Dust). Artefact: Suite of artefacts
• 4 large-scale digital inkjet photographic prints with pencil drawings of dust 100cm x 200cm.
• A series of small pencil drawings on gesso coated copper 10cm x 15cm
The context for this body of work lies within fine art printmaking and contemporary drawing practices. Pencil drawings of fragments of dust are made onto large-scale photographic printed surfaces to assert questions of tactile touch and human contact as having a significant visual impact on certain types of image making. These new works draws upon the key texts of Merleau-Ponty, Nancy and Heidegger to question how the hand and particularly touch is significant and may be evidenced and revealed within an artwork and thereby shift reading and meaning. These texts provide the theoretical framework to the research which explores the inevitability of dust gathering through material processes of making, in direct opposition to the immaterial digitally manifest image. The work reveals how tactile touch provides a significant visual element during image making, which reveals evidence of gravity and weight of human, material existence and has a profound impact in reading and meaning.
The various outputs are brought together as they emerge from this singluar body of practical work and research. The significance of this body of work is verified by the various invitational national and international exhibitions emerging from this work; one of the drawings was selected from over 3,354 entries, and exhibited at Jerwood Drawing Prize 2011; Parallel Prints box set is now held in public collections at V&A, London; University of Kent, UK, and Whangarei Art Museum, New Zealand. The Viewfinder exhibition and symposium I co-curated with Nick Devison, and invited Gill Sauders Head of Prints & Drawings, V&A, London. Invitational conference paper at Impact 8, is a major international printmaking conference in 2013. An article reviewing this work was written by Professor Coldwell, a recognised international figure in the field of contemporary fine art printmaking.
