Relief in time | Time in relief. Expanded printmaking as a conduit for temporal dissonance and the anachronistic

Abstract

This paper, presented at "SNAP3", the 3rd International Printmaking Symposium, Kloster-Bentlage, Germany, discusses how the expanded language of printmaking serves as an appropriate and dynamic conveyor for my research interests into Temporal Dissonance and the Anachronistic. Through the lens of particular sites, often redundant or in a state of flux between dilapidation and development, I try to draw into focus how the past inflects the present altering our conventional understanding of time or our fixed notions of the past, rendering it unstable, malleable and open to reinterpretation. Such reinterpretations are not fixed on a linear axis nor draw from singular sources but are manifested as a multiplicity of different viewpoints with connections and disconnections, creating an image of time and a view of history as one that in the words of Hal Foster, appears to “ramify like a weed or a rhizome”. Time, in these instances, appears displaced and out of sync. Within such sites and spaces, imbued with multiple, overlapping temporalities; time becomes a thing of form, dimensionality and depth, and therefore, seen in relief. This paper was conceived of in tandem with a body of artwork richly informed by printmaking and exhibited at the Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Enschede Holland 27th September – 15th November 2015