Artwork
I am an artist and printmaker, specialising in intricate landscapes and mandalas that bring together ideas from diverse disciplines to create a kind of personal mythology. Printmaking is a wonderfully tactile medium that involves carving a design into a block of wood or a piece of lino, inking it up, and applying pressure to transfer the ink to paper - either with a printing press or a humble wooden spoon. Increasingly my process incorporates digital techniques, ie. sketching and design iteration in Procreate.
This piece - The Citadel of Hue - took a year to design, carve and complete. It is a mandala - a map of a self-contained universe, both internal and external, inspired by an exploration of Hue Citadel on a trip to Vietnam. A mandala is an interactive work of art: they are often used as meditation aids and incorporate imagery and symbols that pertain to specific concepts and ideas. A mandala is a ‘program for the mind’.
When I was travelling, Procreate (a drawing app on the iPad) became invaluable in designing new ideas. I can create a design for an image, copy it, and rapidly iterate it - without having to redraw it in its entirety. I can also easily arrange disparate ideas into canvases, or maps, such as the one below, enabling the large connections between ideas to be more visible.
My next piece - a work in progress - is a modular collage of prints which will be assembled into a new mandala. This approach was borne from constraints: the drive to create a large piece as I travelled, whilst only being able to carry around small pieces of lino. To get around this, I created a modular grid pattern by standardising the sizes of the smaller blocks so they can fit together to form a larger composition. Each piece is relatively intricate and time-consuming, so working on many smaller pieces allows for greater experimentation. This process also means that the composition itself is not fixed - pieces can replaced or rearranged, reflecting a combinatorial, constantly evolving array of concepts. Each print will be an iteration of itself - reflecting the way that we adapt and change when we encounter new people, ideas and experiences.
Metaphors of printmaking are deeply bound up to metaphors of identity and memory: experiences ‘imprint’ themselves, we ‘carve out’ a space for ourselves in the world. A successful image achieves a balance, an integration, of opposites - of black and white. Printmaking has certainly become engrained in my own identity, and I feel fortunate to have found a medium that I will explore for the rest of my life.
