aber ebb and flow - monotypes 2021 - 2022

During 2020, the first COVID-19 lockdown had a considerable impact upon creativity, interrupting any sense of motivation, practice, conception and continuity of thought, research and making. Time became telescoped by having to complete endless risk assessments and developing multiple strategies for teaching students printmaking, firstly online, and then in small socially distanced groups.

2021 however, began with a period of rediscovery and reconnection, where going back to drawing became important for sanity and an escape from endless meetings on Teams, Zoom and Skype.

Having always been a bit of a collector, living across the road from a beach has often provided a source of found materials, flotsam and jetsam, much of which can be assembled and reorganised into varying still life arrangements.

During the second (or was it a third?) lockdown, this built-up repository of seemingly insignificant objects, thus became the focus and inspiration for the series of twenty south beach still life drawings, completed between January and June 2021 and for many of the monoprints and lithographs that have since been made.

Lockdown thus provided a good opportunity to take stock, to review and reflect upon the development of new bodies of work, drawings and prints that employ some of this library of components, available for composition and reconstruction through drawn, etched and printed line, wash, tone and colour.

Increasingly however, lithography plates, stones, blocks and stencils themselves became a part of that repository. In time, stones and plates were added to the thesaurus of deconstructed forms, like words from a dictionary available for selection, to be combined and recombined, synthesised in any number of different ways.

The resulting monoprints are thus unique, variations on a theme - which despite sharing common elements, were often composed at the press, using stencils and masks to select parts of an image, which later may have become collage for yet further prints in the series.