Time, Chemistry, Chance and Human Design

In February 2015, four Fine Art Masters students from the University of Northampton (Susanne Ballinger, Elaine Elcoat, Mimi Tobot and Elizabeth Tomos), accompanied by Lecturer in Printmaking, Catriona Leahy and Reader in Fine Art, Dr. Craig Staff, attended the Frans Masereel Centrum for Printmaking, Belgium, as part of their annual Schools in Residence Programme. In the lead-up to this residency, the students and staff met periodically. We discussed the thread that binds the artists’ sensibilities. We negotiated the language of print and its evolving dialect. We considered its relationship, both tangential and direct, towards the distinctive practices of each individual. Although diverse, the artists were unified by a common curiosity of the inherently tactile materiality of print, its transferability, and its agency to convene multiplicities of meaning. To that end, the artists navigated the discipline’s expanding territory, testing its language against that of drawing, performance, sculpture and installation. Foregrounding the value of tacit knowledge - of making as thinking, the residency was not intended to result in a finite project with resolved outcomes, but rather sought to illuminate the inherently unstable and largely unknowable nature of a phase, a period of time spent working and researching, in its development. The residues left in the aftermath of this research period, this space, which form the pages of this publication, represent propositions, notions, notations, a kind of speculative journey. It calls to mind the finite phenomenon of experience, a moment in time, and the need to render it permanent through an imprint. Reminiscent of the artist book and defiantly object-like, this publication represents an artefact that fixes the traces of documentation, which archive presence and impel future recollection and revisiting.