Atelier Artist in Resident
Frans Masereel Centre, Belgium
prints published by Art on Paper Gallery, Johannesburg

In July of 2007, I worked with printmaker Zhane Warren to complete eleven new performative prints, while on residence at the Frans Masereel Centre in Belgium. These are part of my ongoing Compressionism series: a digital performance and analog archive. The ‘seed’ images were created a few months earlier, by traversing the Irish landscape with a desktop scanner, computer and custom-made battery pack: for example, I scanned slowly around a curved bed of daffodils, made swooping gestures while entrenched in berry bushes, and followed a trail of Autumn’s falling leaves. The resultant, paper-sized files were later stretched, cropped and colored on my laptop, then produced as editioned, archival lambda prints on metallic paper.

Similar to my work with Jillian Ross at the David Krut Print Workshop in Johannesburg, we then took details from the digital prints and iteratively re-made them; I used a computer to sketch out some possibilities, and then more traditional printmaking processes for the final editions: stone lithography, silk screen, woodcut, drypoint and engraving. Here, the dialogs between virtual and actual, performance and art work, are archived as a suite of material objects.