Reduction Woodblock

 

We next moved on to trying reduction woodblock. I stuck with the same theme of children.

 

During further research I came across the UN's Secretary General's report on Violence Against Children which was compiled in 2006. Here is a link to the report in case you want to have a read of it: http://www.unviolencestudy.org/

 

One part that struck me was that in 2006 it was reported that there were 8 million children placed into residential care! 8 MILLION!! "Most are in care because of disability, family disintegration, violence in the home and social and economic conditions such as poverty". Children in these 'caring' environments often have to face violence from their care-givers and other children. 'Discipline' if often dished out with beatings, restraints, or by being locked up. More outrageously shock treatment is inflicted, in the guise of treatment, on children with disabilities. The 'reason' / EXCUSE is to "control their behaviour". Also medication is used to make them more 'compliant'.

 

"In at least 77 countries, corporal and other violent forms of punishment are accepted as legal in penal institutions."

 

I decided to work with the numbers from the report and use them in the form of children's building blocks.

 

 

I drew out the above image, reversed it and transferred it onto a wood block. I printed the background cream. I then cut away the background on the woodblock and left just the shape of the blocks. I printed the blocks in pink. I then cut out the detail of the blocks '2', '7' and '6' and printed yellow.

 

 
Next I carved out the detail of '0' and '7' and printed in green.

 

Finally I carved out the detail of '8' and '0' and printed in light blue.

 

 

Here are a few different variations I tried. I don't think the dark blue and red version worked!! I liked the final one which is all higgledy piggledy.

 

Silk Screen

Next brief was either 'Protest' or 'Humour'. I decided to go with protest. I wanted to stick with a similar theme from when I was working on photography. I wanted to look further in to the topic of abuse and violence against children.

From my research on protest against clerical abuse, I came across a protest where people tied babies shoes to a railing. I felt that working with clothes would be very effective in making an impact.

I started working with various compositions - some were more complicated than necessary!!

Here is a collage I made to imply a washing line. I put in a priest's rope and daises (symbol of innocence).


Here is the final image I decided to work with. I wanted the clothes to appear ragged and torn to imply the abuse that occurred. I read various survivors' personal experiences and thoughts and used their names and ages of when the abuse occurred, and put these on the items of clothing.

On the top right hand side I wrote the name 'Brendan Age 46' - to imply Fr. Brendan Smith who committed awful acts of abuse for a long period while in a position of trust and authority.

I drew the images onto MRPVC with a light fast marker, and exposed the images onto a screen for printing.

I printed various layers, light blue background, pink for the top and dress, green for the babygrow and a section of the dress, darker blue for the dungarees and yellow for the pegs and design on the top.

 

Finally I again exposed the outline onto a screen for printing. I printed this in black on top of the image.

 

 

 

I printed a repeated pattern on newsprint. I thought the dungarees were really cute

Lithography

 

Next is Lithography. I really felt passionate about the insitutional abuse theme that developed while working on the photography project. The one image that really made me want to work more on is the photo of the confessional box with the disturbed curtain. I decided to work on this actual image for the litho stone.

 

 

 

The process of working with litho stones is very long, but it's a change of pace to etching which is not a bad thing!! I really enjoyed it. I'll only briefly explain what I did (there are 22 steps for preparing the stone alone!!). I had to check that the stone was level as this would affect the printing of my final image. Next I ground the stone using various grades of carborundum (coarse, medium and fine) three times with each, extra emphasis on where the stone was higher. Once ground and flat I then allowed the stone to dry and filed the edges. I recorded the size of my stone, intended image and boarder needed. I put gum Arabic on the boarder area, and allowed it to dry. Then I started drawing my image:

This is from my sketchbook

 

This is it on the litho stone. It's reversed so when I print it it'll print as in my sketchbook (I hope!)

 

It's currently etching at the moment and will be printing later this week or next week hopefully. There's a queue for the presses. Gotta wait my turn... I'll update as soon as I have prints to show.

 

In the meantime I started playing around with ideas on some photocopies I made.

 

 Here I placed some tracing paper over the confessional box and wrote out words that came to mind while actually looking at it.

 

Later I then decided to go a step further....... I made a minature confessional box out of a cardboard box.

 

 As you open the doors on the confessional box, you can see text written on the back wall - thoughts of mine about what the confessional would represent. I also placed sweet wrappers on the floor - representing temptation / reward. How does it make you feel? What words come to your mind when you look at this?

Photography

We have also been working with photography. Our brief was to also work along the same theme of Headlines and Stories. I was to take 8 photos a week for 3 weeks, total of 24 photos altogether, and then select our top 8. I found selecting the final ones difficult!!!

 

I started thinking of theft and crime, and staged a scene of me trying to break into a car (my own car may I add!!!). And I also was told I was trying to break in the wrong way!!! Ah well, at least I know I'll never make a career out of stealing cars!! I also staged climbing into my house. I made them black & white as they looked so much better than in colour. What do you think?

 

 

 

 

I then wanted to go further with the crime theme, and gave a lot of thought of what types of things are stolen from us. One that stuck out for me is dignity. This can be taken away by the way we are treated. Unfortunately, people get abused and treated badly within institutions in society. There are so many types of institutional abuse, and we hear more and more frightening stories every day. I took some photos of some institutions as a representation of this theme. I'm not saying that any abuse actually occurred in any of these buildings specifically. They are only used here as a symbol for my theme.

 

 

 

 

 

These are only some of the photos I took. This final image really made an impact on me. This is a confessional box in a deconsecrated church. This building is just locked up and not in use anymore. Thankfully I was able to get to photograph it. When looking at the confessional box I felt uneasy. The way the curtain is sitting made me feel like something wrong happened here. It's like there is a gap in the curtain for you to peek in, and it also feels like you shouldn't look. I will work with this image again.

 

 

Just going back to the theme of robbing the eye out of your head, I took these just for fun! I wanted to use real eyeballs and had it organised with my local butcher that I could get some sheep's eyes, but time was against me! Instead I was lucky enough that it was around Halloween and got chocolate eyes. Not quite the same effect but I like the photos anyway. Real eyeballs for another day....

 



Headlines & Stories

 

 

Back to college!! The brief we got is about Headlines & Stories - depicting what interests me personally in the news. After brainstorming and sieving through many ideas, I went with the theme of theft and crime. Generally, since the recession, crime rate has risen and thieves are becoming more brave and cheeky!! Nothing seems to be sacred at all anymore.These thieves don't seem to consider the fact that people are struggling and working really hard to try and pay bills. These criminals have an air of entitlement and believe that there is nothing wrong with taking what is not theirs. As the saying goes - they would nearly rob the eye out of your head!!!

 

That's where I came up with the idea of a print. I thought of a handful of eyeballs to represent the multitude of thefts from various people. This is the image I went with. Because I was working with etching I had to work out how to etch the tonal qualities on the plate. Here are the various backgrounds I played with:

 

 

 

I ended up going with the first one. After preparing my plate with hard ground on the front (to scratch my image onto) and bitumen on the back to prevent the back of the plate during etching, I then scratched out my image.

 

 

I then starting the etching process by attaching a strip of brown tape to the back of the plate and a piece of stick at the end (this would allow me to dip the plate in and out of the acid without touching the plate itself). I dipped it in the acid for 5 minutes, then washed and dried it. I blocked out areas of the plate where I wanted the lines to be light (painted on bitumen). I dipped the plate again for a further 10 minutes and repeated the process. I continued this until the plate had been dipped for 40 minutes in total. This gave me different variations of tonal lines. This is what the plate looked like after etching:

 

 

 Next I started printing!!! Here are a few examples of how my prints came out:

 

This is printed with a very deep red. I liked how it came out

 

I printed this in black ink, but painted with watercolours in the background. I think this works really well. The hands with eyes really stands out.

 

With this one I used a piece of acetate and etched out the iris' of the eyes and inked them in various colours and printed it on top of the print

Here I cut out the iris' and placed various coloured pieces of transparency celophene. This was lit from behind and doesn't show the colours very well - sorry!

 

Here I played with the form known as chine colle - a process combining pieces of paper to the image with spray glue. The various pieces of paper I used were stories from the newspapers about theft. I also used a little tissue paper too. This particular process didn't work well with my theme here as it took away from the actual image I had created, but I'm glad I tried it. Hopefully I'll try it again on another project.

 

This final image I put up is one of my favourites. I inked up the plate with red ink, mixed some blue with transparency and rolled up the plate. I then put it through the press. I think it works as the image seems to stand out from the background
 

 The main artist I looked at for style of image is Philip Guston. I love his almost cartoon like images. Here are a few examples of his work:

 

Here is also a youtube piece on Philip Guston if you're interested. I really love his work.

 

Philip Guston - Short Documentary

 

 

There's also a Limerick artist that reminds me of Philip Guston's work. He's Mike Culliney and I think his work is brilliant! Here are a couple of images that I love and I've also attached a link to his blog if you want to check him out:

 

 

Here is the link to his blog. He's well worth checking out!!! Mike Culliney's Blog