OUT BRIEF CANDLE XL

I have long had a wish to see the Out Brief Candle artworks executed on a larger scale. The original 25 x 25 cm plate lithographs were designed to work around my working space and physical abilities, as I was and still am printing those plates by hand. The paramount goal was always control over the image quality.

Lithography is a multistage technology sensitive to both the environment and mechanics. For my work to go XL, I had to look for a larger press and a capable studio to handle the brief: precise, sensitive, and sustainable. And I was lucky to find kindred spirits in the Curwen Lithography Studio team. Curwen is one of the largest and oldest lithography studios in the UK. Originally set up by Stanley Jones in 1958, the studio has worked with “who’s who” of British and International art: Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Graham Sutherland, Elizabeth Frink, John Piper, and Paula Rego, to name but a few. I am both excited and comforted I am in good hands.

The choice I had to make now was the following: how would I feel giving up the direct contact with the ink and the plate, the last critical stage of the process controlled by my hand?

The answer came by assessing the importance of creative choices relating to the project. Critically, the images you look at are not and were never intended to be what we think of as “reproduction”. There was never an “original image”. Think of it as a piece of music conceived by the mind and executed with the help of an instrument, modes of execution aside, the offering was always intended for humans.

The relinquishing of direct contact in the photolithographic process is ultimately the point of the “Out Brief Candle” project. The use of digital image processing and the precision of an industrial press operation is my deliberate choice entirely. A detachment in the name of storytelling. These images were created out of dreaming and machine execution in equal parts.

Over the years of work on those works, I started to see opportunities in this kind of attitude, valuing its much-desired ambiguity and openness.

A process that does not rely on the human touch for delivery is perfect for communicating the delicate and often mirky life of the imagination.

I worked in the service of the image.

In many ways, the general and implied misconception is that photo and digital processing within art-making is there to reproduce and translate marks created by an artist’s hand. It can be. But. Think twice. The process itself could be a creation of a language (and not merely a technique). We as humans create via technology and always have done. We are ourselves, also a technology that forever evolves to scope and push. A human goes where a mind leads.

If you look closer, you will see the images are a swarm of tiny dots. These are the building blocks, cells, and instruments for construction and improvisation. The dot inherently lacks ownership, does not have a style, and is independent of authorship.  It does not appropriate or simulate – it just exists.

A digital dot is free of historical tradition the way we think of an art tradition. It is still an alien language,  made up on the spot, trying, new. An exciting proof that humans are hard-wired to invent, connect, and explain the world around us by whichever means available.

The dots are there to be grouped, edited, and assembled, bordering on the spaces that are free from the dot presence, empty. The tension of the space occupied by solidity and lacking one is what we perceive as shapes. And shapes make imaginations work hard, creating connections between mine and yours.

“Out Brief Candle XL” is a selection of original images reworked in a larger format:
Image size 45 x 45 cms
Paper size 52 x 52 cms
Edition 25 +APs
RRP £400