'under the skin'

A short essay on the digital work of sculptor Shelagh Cluett.incorporated into the catalogue text for 'La Cabinet de Curiosities de Mademoiselle Cluoette' by Virgina Whiles

Signs of Life

A site-specific installation and PDF publication made in response to the abandoned site of St Clements Psychiatric Hospital, Mile End, London. A series of texts and images located on pin-boards found in the waiting room used to show the work. Some were motorised, others situated on the wall. The images were drawn from an early photograph of my grandmother from time concurrent with the narrative. Stockham explored narratives of the use of ECT and the question of biology and biography in relation to mental health

The Negligent Eye

This publication accompanies the exhibition The Negligent Eye, curated by Jo Stockham, Head of Printmaking at the Royal College of Art, and developed in collaboration with the Bluecoat, Liverpool, 8 March – 15 June 2014. The exhibition reflected the ways artists use scanning technology in their work, particularly in the area of printmaking. This publication develops these ideas through essays by Stockham and Chantal Faust that explore the idea that the scan is both a ‘close reading and a glance’, an apparent contradiction that the artists explore through the rapidly developing scanning and other digital reprographic processes at their disposal. Images of the works in the exhibition are accompanied by texts from the artists – including Cory Arcangel, Christiane Baumgartner, Jyll Bradley, Maurice Carlin, Susan Collins, Conroy/Sanderson, Nicky Coutts, Elizabeth Gossling, Juneau Projects, Bob Matthews, London Fieldworks, Marilène Oliver, South Atlantic Souvenirs, Imogen Stidworthy – in response to questions about their relationship to scanning

Docked and Parked

This chapter aims to explore the sensuous experience of walking between sites of the city which pull the viewer into different historical and affective spaces. Can a smell be a monument? Are the enveloping tons of particulates poisoning city dwellers an atomised monument to lack of foresight? When the air is so thick with dust you can taste it, is this a cloud monument parallel to the concrete poured and the rubble pounded? To walk is to be naked to the surfaces of the world, the holes of the body invaded, sound, sight, taste, smell, all without the filter of screen, of glass. Walk to the Park, the trees breathe into me, walk to the River, it flows me to Canada, walk past the Alaska works, seals made into hats. I work in the abandoned church, the stink of dead pigeons and a gloomy light. Give it the flickering life of a film, local men push over walls, building the flats I live in now, monuments to the present future

Image Capture

Keynote Speech at the conference RE:PRINT_RE:Present, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. A kind of created attention deficit disorder seems to operate on us all today to make and distribute images and information at speed. What values do ways of making, which require slow looking, or intensive material explorations have in this accelerated system? How are our perceptions of reality being altered by the world-view presented in the smooth colorful ever morphing simulations that surround us? Why would a time consuming practice like etching have anything to offer in this situation? The limitations of digital technology are often a starting point for artists to reflect on our relationship to real-world fragility. I will be using some example of my own work and that of very recent graduates to look at practices where tactility or dimensionality in a form of hard copy engages with these questions, with reference to the writings of Flusser and Steyerl

Negligent Eye

This presentation was both an illustrated lecture and a published paper presented at the IMPACT 9 Conference Printmaking in the Post-Print Age, Hangzhou China 2015. It was an extension of the exhibition catalogue essay for the Bluecoat Gallery Exhibition of the same name. In 2014 I curated an exhibition The Negligent Eye at the Bluecoat Gallery in Liverpool as the result of longstanding interest in scanning and 3D printing and the role of these in changing the field of Print within Fine Art Practice. In the aftermath of curatingshow I have continued to reflect on this material with reference to the writings of Vilém Flusser and Hito Steyerl. The work in the exhibition came from a wide range of artists of all generations most of whom are not explicitly located within Printmaking. Whilst some work did not use any scanning technology at all, a shared fascination with the particular translating device of the systematizing ‘eye’ of a scanning digital video camera, flatbed or medical scanner was expressed by all the work in the show. Through writing this paper I aim to extend my own understanding of questions, which arose from the juxtapositions of work and the production of the accompanying catalogue. The show developed in dialogue with curators Bryan Biggs and Sarah-Jane Parsons of the Bluecoat Gallery who sent a series of questions about scanning to participating artists. In reflecting upon their answers I will extend the discussions begun in the process of this research. A kind of created attention deficit disorder seems to operate on us all today to make and distribute images and information at speed. What value do ways of making which require slow looking or intensive material explorations have in this accelerated system? What model of the world is being constructed by the drive to simulated realities toward ever-greater resolution, so called high definition? How are our perceptions of reality being altered by the world-view presented in the smooth colourful ever morphing simulations that surround us? The limitations of digital technology are often a starting point for artists to reflect on our relationship to real-world fragility. I will be looking at practices where tactility or dimensionality in a form of hard copy engages with these questions using examples from the exhibition. Artists included in the show were: Cory Arcangel, Christiane Baumgartner, Thomas Bewick, Jyll Bradley, Maurice Carlin, Helen Chadwick, Susan Collins, Conroy/Sanderson, Nicky Coutts, Elizabeth Gossling, Beatrice Haines, Juneau Projects, Laura Maloney, Bob Matthews, London Fieldworks (with the participation of Gustav Metzger), Marilène Oliver, Flora Parrott, South Atlantic Souvenirs, Imogen Stidworthy, Jo Stockham, Wolfgang Tillmans, Alessa Tinne, Michael Wegerer, Rachel Whiteread, Jane and Louise Wilson. Scanning, Art, Technology, Copy, Materiality

Orbis Pictus, Copy and Paste.

This paper is informed by Jo Stockham work as an artist using maps, ground-plans and anatomical images, and associatively mapping the relations between parts via installations, a process of embodying the diagrammatic. Experience of running the print programme at the RCA for almost 10 years informs her sense of the ways digitisation has shifted and expanded the field of print. Universities are investing in vast management databases, and digitising archives, often clearing out older technologies and documents to make way for them. But as the myths of the freedom of the web collapse around us, with the exposure of the narrow interests served, is our perpetual state of distraction and information-gathering distancing us from the world at large even as it connects us

The Negligent Eye

The exhibition The Negligent Eye reflects on the ways contemporary artists have used scanning technology in their work, particularly in the area of printmaking. The project reflects an increasing experimentation with computers, rapid-form and 3D scanning and digital multiplication, through printed, sculptural, video and mixed media work, as well as earlier artworks using reprographic processes, and archival material. Curated by Jo Stockham in collaboration with the Bluecoat Gallery, the project reflects upon how over-immersion in the space of the computer creates a sense of estrangement from the world. The exhibition engages with wider questions around the impact of digital technology on our lives. How, for instance, are scanning technologies changing how we picture and experience the world? The barcode, airport body scanners, medical scans and document scanners are all fraught with notions of both revelation and theft, while the extension of digital multiplication into cloning remains contentious. The publication that accompanies the exhibition develops these ideas through essays by Jo Stockham and Chantal Faust, exploring the idea that the scan is both a ‘close reading and a glance’, an apparent contradiction that the artists explore through the rapidly developing scanning and digital reprographic processes at their disposal. Images of the works in the exhibition are accompanied by texts from the artists – including Cory Arcangel, Christiane Baumgartner, Jyll Bradley, Maurice Carlin, Susan Collins, Conroy/Sanderson, Nicky Coutts, Elizabeth Gossling, Juneau Projects, Bob Matthews, London Fieldworks, Marilène Oliver, South Atlantic Souvenirs, Imogen Stidworthy – in response to questions about their relationship to scanning

and then again......

Exhibition curated by ex RCA Print Alumni Liz Collini and Portuguese artist Ana Fonseca. There was also a catalogue for which I wrote an essay, Printmaking Is an Expanded Field. I put in two prints; one a small scroll 'Moving Landscape' which hung inside the gallery, the other a poster image 'Now and Then' which was pinned to a tree in the gardens. The exhibition included 13 graduates of the RCA print program and five members of staff alongside 11 artists selected by the Portuguese curator

Image Capture, an exercise in self thinging

A series of images created by 3D scanning became a starting point to write a text about our changing relationship to technology. The chapter is built on the keynote lecture 'Image Capture' delivered at Anglia Ruskin University in 2015. The writing reflects on the process of being scanned and the capturing and framing of the screen grabs used. The writing was a response to a request to think about Reproduction, Technicity and Intermediacy.The work is part of ongoing research interests which centre on exploring the affect of technology, and the ways in which our sense of embodiment are changed by such engagement. RE:PRINT brings together the work of twenty contemporary artists working in the field of expanded printmaking, to explore the relationship between print media, interdisciplinary art and new technologies