Field of View

This large body of monoprints began during a residency at the Nirox Foundation in the Cradle of Humankind in June 2012. I spent three weeks there, and during the final week, Bevan de Wet from Artist Proof Studio joined me with a portable printing press and an intimidating abundance of paper.

Earlier that year, Bevan and I had collaborated on a suite of five etchings, which had produced a substantial number of process and test prints. Rather than discard them, we chose to recycle these as the foundation for a new series, layering them with twelve linocut plates I had carved during my time at Nirox.

What began as an intensive week of collaboration at Nirox extended over several months through July, August, and September as we continued working in Johannesburg. Some prints passed through the press as many as six times. The challenge was to preserve complexity and depth within the rigid structure of the lino plates, without overworking them. When I first cut the plates, I had only a loose sense of how the layers might interact. Each printing stage revealed unexpected relationships between marks, textures, and surfaces, a process full of surprise and discovery.