Print Research Network

Print Research Network

The paradox of the multi-disaplinary, pluristic curriculum in Fine Art education has been the narrowing of many students' experience and understanding of how art can be made. For made, created, realised or performed is eventually has to be.The realisation of an idea through artistic means with any sensitivity and understanding in relation to the materials and processes used can only occur with some knowledge and experience gained from specialisation (time) taken to explore the intrinsic and unique nature of materials and processes. Specialisation, however, has become an anathema within Fine Art education implying 'craft' and work lacking in intellectual content. Printmaking has fallen foul of this notion.Compounded by the academic withdrawl from the making environments (workshops and studios), students enter printrooms to find only technical support implying and underlining the idea that 'technique' is all there is to printmaking and leading to the printroom being used mostly as a rerprographic facility.This disjunction of theory and practice gives a particular message to students, that theory and intellectual reasoning does not occur during the act of making and consequently the act of making is undervalued. As a result printmaking studios and other workshop facilities are in danger of becoming token resource areas.Printmaking survives as a healthy authentic means of artistic expression if we address the underlying and fundamental oversight by those in education who think that making is only a mechanical and technical process devoid of intellectual value.Perhaps we should at least ensure that the difference between printing and printmaking is known and undertood. We know but do they?

Gillian Golding
07 Oct 2007