Notions of Identity

We were given the title "Notions of Identity" as our brief title for are semester 2 print project. I thought about this alot and since the title was quite broad, I decided that I wanted to focus on a more general idea then a personal one. I began looking at homeless people, and how they have lost their identities to the street. We as passers by, no longer see them as people with an identity. We begin to associate them with the places and areas that they occupy. Damp, grim, harsh, dirty spots. We forget these people have a name, an age, a family and a story.

Mini Print Project

On Tuesday we were given a mini print project. I think this was a good idea as it put us under pressure and we had to use the techniques we had already learned from the workshop to create two identical prints based on the brief title "clutter". To me, the term clutter means useless pointless objects that take up space and there identity and beauty are lost in all the chaos. I had the skeleton of a broken umbrella in my room with a pile of other useless objects. To me there is something eerily beautiful about this umbrella, its like a creature. I decided to take it away from all the clutter and brought it outside onto the street and photographed it on the cobblelocks in the lashing rain.

An over flow of receipts!

I wanted the receipts to really look like they were taking up my space in my studio so i cut up some of  my weaker prints and arranged them so they look like they are overspilling from one of my prints all over the place causing havoc.

Trying to capture the deteriorated state of receipts.

I wanted to try capture the deteriorated appearance of the old receipts in my prints . I attempted this by monoprinting a faded barcode in gray ink on top of a dirty blotchy yellow monoprint. I then printed my inked up dry points on top of these monoprint. I think the piece worked well

Printing On My Receipts

I etched in separate drawings I did with my receipts using a scribe, how ever black on white just seemed rather boring and repetitive and it wasnt capturing the old grubby cluttering qualities of the old receipts. So I monoprinted a bright yellow and using white spirit i wiped away certain areas, I got the yellow ink slightly dirty with some of the used oil rags as I though this would achieve the grubbyness of the crumbled pieces. I then thought it would be effective, and bring my prints into another dimension if I actually printed on the receipts themselves. I asked one of my tutors and she said she wasnt sure if it would work as they only usually print of tissue or crepe paper but we decided to experiment with the receipts. First I placed my inked plates on the press , I then tore up some of my old receipts and placed them on top of the plates. We then used these special white crystally glue things and sprinked them on top of the receipts, and finally we placed my wet yellow monoprints down and these were the results which I think were every effective.

PLEASE RETAIN YOUR RECEIPT

On closer inspection of my receipts, I noticed that pretty much all of them say "PLEASE RETAIN YOUR RECEIPT". I decided I would do a small etching of these words, as they tie in greatly with my project and really bring my prints together by adding a phrase commonly associated with old receipts.

I also noticed on every receipt there are also barcodes with numbers underneath. We see hundreds of these barcodes everyday and think nothing of them, they themselves become rubbish and meaningless to me with my receipts. I did a lightly scratched dry point etch on acetate of a barcode

My Old Receipts

 I first did a sketch of the receipts spilling out of my purse, I really liked this drawing so I decided it would be really good for a dry point etch. I never did drypoint etching before, I've never done print before at all actually! Anyways, I etched it into my acetate plate, but unknowingly I scratched in too deep, so I wasn't left with the fine lines in my drawing, but more like marker thick lines in my prints. This was not the effect I wanted so I am now etching separate receipts  on acetate and I'm going to cut around them so I can position them any which way I want in my prints. Even though this etching failed, it was a learning experience, and I now know how deep a line I should scratch in so I wont be making this mistake again (hopefully)