I’m in the middle of some experiments with photocollagraph. Earlier this year I took a carborundum collagraph workshop with Joyce Silverstone at Zea Mays Printmaking. I was at the beginning of developing a way of making prints from clothing and household textiles about memory and doing things in the dark using a reductive monotype method with large gelatin plates.
In the collagraph workshop, I made impressions from clothes into carborundum mixed with gel medium on PETG plates. The resulting plates were a way to develop an image that is also a trace of the depicted object. I continued to develop this idea of the trace through a series of gelatin plate monotypes that have been described as photographic because of the high level of detail that they record. The once three-dimensional textiles flattened by my gelatin plate monotypes echo the super-flat look of work made on the photocopier.
Interested in the tension between recording a surface and the visual similarity to recording light (though photographic processes), I have turned around to look back to the sculptural surface of the collagraph plate and the potential to use it to represent a photographic image. Thinking that it could be interesting to use images made on the photocopier to develop collagraph plates, I have been working on developing some photocollagraph methods that use inexpensive and non-toxic processes.
I am working concurrently on developing two approaches to photocollagraph:
Direct: photo emulsion coated plate, developed using a silkscreen exposure unit and oiled photocopy positive
Indirect: print acrylic medium onto a prepared plate through a photo silkscreen stencil made from oiled photocopy positive, with or without carborundum Still to test: Indirect using new Akua Carborundum Gel
I will be teaching a class on these methods sometime in the next workshop cycle at Zea Mays Printmaking.
images above: ESW, work in progress, 2017, 8″x10″ and 8″x8″ photocollagraph printed with Akua intaglio inks
