Printmaking the art that dare not speak its name!

Print Research Network

The distance from a studio practice for many Fine Art students grows
greater each year as pressures of reduced economic resources and the cost of building space price different studio practices out to the margins of higher education and increasingly towards out sourcing organizations. Combined with a conceptual fashion that describes the creation of art work to be isolated in terms of pure ideas--the fabrication left to another agent more like the process of designer to industrial maker, many fine art students leave colleges with little or no experience of making their own work. Printmaking becomes merely a reproductive exercise, other basic fine art activities designed models for fabricators to follow or enlarge to specified sizes. It is almost an act of pride to distance ones self as far as possible from the making and overseeing the making of work, to avoid the general trail and error of progressing a work towards both knowledge of a practice and within the reactive form of expression chosen from the experience of making.
Printmaking by its nature demands a basic understanding of the possibilities of the materials and processes used--that is not to say that when possible that work can be made by others for you under very careful supervision but how many people have the resources to do that. Even more particularly why is it even being suggested to fine art students that their direct post college experience will allow their resources to be applied that way? Is it not a cruel pretence to allow the notion that work has to be made for one and that the exercise of full control over an art work is a thing of the past. We are too easily taken in by the virtues of a virtual practice being enough to encompass the whole need of human expression.

Stephen Mumuberson
September 25, 2007