Printmaking - Etching & Lithography

Saturday 21st October 2023

Books of lithographs.

Lithographs of micrographs.

Micrographs of natural material.

Natural material collected from landscape.

This is the basis of my practical work until spring. The project is going to be split into books of prints and large scale prints, both focusing on photomicrographs – photographs through a microscope. It is a continuation of the codex series, which ended with Blood Book II.

The microscope provides a new perspective and way of seeing,

it helps you see reality differently, it also restricts your vision as you look down it.

The process of using the microscope is both meditative and existential.

The material that is being examined provides context and its own connotations. Blood, for example, can represent unity or division, a single person or many, it can have positive and negative connotations, can be from something living or dead.

Materials for micrographs can be collected on walks in landscape.

Some materials for the book e.g., the cover, could be biomaterial like kombucha leather.

With Codex project, 2020, my micrographs were predominantly of cow's blood, although Blood book I did use my own blood. In this project, I plan on exclusively using my own blood to avoid potential harmful bacteria from large quantities of blood. In Blood Book II, I used acetate, which I no longer want to use in this project. If successful, I want to use kombucha leather, or SCOBY, for the book covers. From Codex Project, I learnt to always keep a dust cover on my microscope and leave slides in a protective box. That experimental binding techniques are exciting, but I don't need to 'reinvent the wheel', sometimes a simple technique is useful to progress faster.