Research In Print (making)
(This post was written in January 2021 and languished in my laptop until now because I was afraid to post something I didn’t think was good enough. Read on for irony.)
Part of being an academic, a PhD student, is about learning to become a writer. I haven’t written anything in a long time. It’s been a rough year. But I like the idea of being a writer. For me it’s an aspirational identity that I try it on sometimes for special occasions (or conference papers). Like high heels, I enjoy wearing them in the abstract, admiring myself in the mirror before quickly realising the discomfort that comes from actually walking in them. I power walk everywhere and have no patience for dainty steps. I have this space (my website) to blog about medical anthropology, microbes, AMR, pandemics and bioart - topics that thrill, fascinate and terrify me. If 2021 were a normal year I might think about writing on this blog as a new year’s resolution. But this is a pandemic year, ‘covidtimes’ if you will and resolutions are for times when the ground is a little firmer under foot than it is now. Although there are no shortages of microbes, infections and deadly fascinating questions for medical anthropologists, today, I want to write about printmaking.
Drawing is fundamental and embodied, it has a muscle memory. Stretching back to moving a stick in the dirt as a child or muddy finger painting playing in the garden, mark making is instinctive. It is also ancient. Scientists discovered hand stencils in an Indonesian cave which are about 40,000 years old, made my blowing paint around hands pressed against the rock. To me, this is the essence of what humans do, we make marks to express and connect.
Tired of screens and trying to find the words to capture the acute experience of living through History, last summer I bought a small sketch book. The intention was to carry it around with me so I could record small vignettes of Edinburgh or places I would visit. Art is beyond language. I enjoy drawing with pen, knowing that without the ability to take back lines with an eraser or fuss them into perfection I have to own my marks. To draw like this is to give myself permission to make mistakes, experiment with sketches and not be too precious about the end result. That last part is advice from my Mum (a lifelong maker and mixed media artist): ‘Don’t be precious’. This is good advice – I struggle to take it. ‘Don’t be precious’ says that you can always try again, that you have enough time to make mistakes and learn from them, that art is a process. Experimentation, play, imagination and the attempt are far more precious that perfection. These lessons are ones I need to repeat again and again and again.
In September I was in the Cairngorms of Scotland, staying in a tiny perfect cabin surrounded by ancient stone walls and beech trees, rabbits, mushrooms, deer and ticks. Walking in the woods I found a nest on the ground, empty but perfect, lying like a gift waiting to be found. I carefully tucked it away and brought it home, even moving flats with the nest in a special box to keep it safe. I sketched the nest many times, trying to capture how the different kinds of mosses, lichens, feathers, horsehair, plastic netting, down and grasses came together to make this tiny once-home.
I gave myself a bloody finger the first time I tried to cut the lino. Like with the pen, the marks you make cutting into the lino are permanent; you can’t take them back once they have been made. For me, print making takes drawings and turns them into something more solid, more real. You create both the block and the print. I had just moved into a new flat after ending a long-term relationship. It was my first time living alone and during another isolating lockdown. Working with the nest was a hopeful reminder that home is a place woven together of many kinds of thread. I also liked the reminder that humans (let alone those that work in universities) are not the only beings engaged in meaningful work, creative problem solving, collaboration and homemaking.
Printing has a steady rhythmic process that must be followed regardless of the image you want to create. It requires structure for that process to unfold, which helps to keep me in motion, with direction. Printing involves tools that I can hold in my hands. I love the feel of the smooth wooden handle of my cutting tool that buts snuggly against my palm. I love the satisfying action of the little wooden stick you use to change out the blades and the sound of the roller on sticky ink. I enjoy feeling the quality of the translucent Ho Sho paper my Mum gave to me with its long silky fibres and tuning into the rhythm of inking up a block. I love the big reveal after spending hours mapping out the design with pencil, carving into the lino block, inking up the roller on the plate, carefully lowering the paper and pressing block into paper. Then, you lift the paper (hopefully with a little sticking sound that lets you know the ink has taken) and suddenly, as if by magic, you have a fully formed beautiful image. The paper is transformed into a print.
Printmaking has an inherently agential quality. In my industry getting your work into print is necessary for survival. But here, there is not waiting to be published, no supplication is required to put ink to paper. For an early career academic this is exhilarating, like a gift you give yourself. Print is both noun and verb. The finished piece is a relationship between mark making, ink and the paper itself. My prints are part of a process, they are the experimental outcomes of play, of curiosity, of a desire to explore. I still find writing scary. But I am trusting the process. Trying not to be too precious. Experimenting. A different kind of research in print.