Slow scrutiny. Approaches to Printmaking in the Time of Covid

The panel discussion will examine similarities and differences in recent works by Leora Brook, Paul Coldwell, and Johanna Love and explore their relevance to a post-pandemic sensibility. These works are all ‘quiet’ images, predominantly monochrome, and all are representations of familiar objects/matter, scrutinised closely and paradoxically made less familiar through this scrutiny.

In the context of Covid, new relevance and resonance of the themes emerge. The importance of touch and connection to the physical world, the sense of isolation and the use of the ordinary or familiar as vehicles for the mind to travel far beyond.

Brook’s mezzotints of folds of sheets are small, secretive and mysterious. The laborious drawing of the image resonates with the sense of time slowed down, a frozen glimpse of a moment. The intimate, overlooked, material event metamorphoses through touch into a sombre site of ambiguous implication.

Coldwell’s prints pursue his long-term exploration of the language of still life, here developing images that originate in the studio as models made from a variety of materials. These images are mediated through the half-tone, engaging the viewer with the act of looking, placing the image just beyond touch.

Love uses the slow process of stone lithography to transform the deadpan strangeness of scientific images of dust particles into something more human, material and physical. She sees drawing on the grainy stone as a collaboration of image and surface, the image slowly emerges, like a fossil being gradually made visible.

The discussion will focus on the different strategies adopted as well as how this informed the chosen processes. In each case, slowness and the time taken for the image to emerge is a key element in their decision making. The discussion will draw out new insights into the ways print engages with our sense of touch, distance, presence and time in a post-pandemic world.