FEATURES ARCHIVE

We talk to Professor Jo Stockham and a few of the promising young printmakers involved with the fair this year about their work and the collaboration between Multiplied and the Royal College of Art.

PROFESSOR JO STOCKHAM, HEAD OF THE PRINTMAKING PROGRAMME AT THE ROYAL COLLEGE OF ART SINCE 2008.

How did you get involved with Multiplied?
Lizzie Perrotte, from Christie’s Education, visited the final shows at the RCA which include works from students of the Printmaking programme. She was curious that there was so much variety in the print students’ work, that she could not quite place them categorically as their work related to print in many unexpected ways.

We responded to the invitation to use the Christie’s space during Multiplied to show work which explores ideas of the multiple, the found image and the histories and politics of media in ways that are experimental and challenging.

MADALINA ZAHARIA

Tell us about your work…
Throughout my work I am always looking for the absurd, the laughable, the unimportant and the fictitious in everyday life. I’m interested in points of contact and osculation where art, history and politics intersect in the most unexpected ways, and in order to bring myself closer to what I want to express, I tend to work with all kinds of media, from photography to video, performance, sound, objects and print. Print for me is a form of analysing and formalising my ideas, and I repeatedly use it within my work as a means of both elucidating and eluding my audience.

How did you get involved with Multiplied and Christie’s?
After finishing my MA in Printmaking, I was contacted by our head of department, Jo Stockham, about the possibility of an exhibition as part of the Multiplied Fair at Christie’s. We immediately saw this as a great opportunity for showcasing the diverse use of print inside our department, but also as a way of exploring the manifold nature of print within contemporary art. Together with the exhibition we are also planning the launch of our Casual Ties box set, which is the result of a collaborative project between the Printmaking and the Critical Writing departments at the Royal College of Art and explores the vast relationship between print, image and text. Our aim is to create a space where print can manifest and exist in all its diversity and variance, and in order to do so, we are putting together a number of works that can challenge and scrutinize the future of print itself.

CHRIS MERCIER

Tell us about your work…
My current work elaborates on the concepts of replication, repetition, folding and multiplication. There is a meditative dimension to repetition that can be found in Buddhist mantras for example, to which the early development and success of printing technologies in oriental societies could be attributed, where repetition is seen as a way to achieve enlightenment.

The French word 'plier', meaning to fold, links this idea of replication and multiplication to the concept and activity of folding. This repetition is also to be found in the manufacture and structure of the book, the codex.

My most recent work concerns itself with the structures that define our verbal and written language, namely the mechanics of the alphabet and its articulation. I have created from the ligatures and the structural elements of our Roman alphabet, a set of new-found consonants or hybrid letter-forms. I tried not to introduce any totally alien elements, by confining myself to using just the components that we are all familiar with.

How did you get involved with Multiplied and Christie’s?
I became aware of Christie's Multiplied Event during the period I was studying for my MA in Fine Art Printmaking at The Royal College of Art. I was very pleased to be part of the 2012 year group of RCA graduates to have been invited to participate in the show.

SOFIE GREVELIUS

Tell us about your work…
I’ve recently begun to describe my work as still lifes. The works are quite simply interpretations of the world around me. I combine these interpretations with each other, constantly on the lookout for similarities and connections between them. To give you an example, I’ve spent the last few years looking at the similarities between a basketball court, and a busy city street.

My practice is concerned with an idea of a collective movement, of social contracts and with power in relationship to trust.

I am interested in the push and pull between the two- and three-dimensional. The drawings, prints and objects I make look familiar and seem to have a functional purpose yet are ‘non-functional’. Some works have been described as props and that description feels spot-on, as there is definitely a performative element to the work. 

KIRSTY HENDRY

Tell us about your work…
Our experience of the image is the nucleus of my practice. We live in a society completely saturated with the image, the representation, and the copy. My practice revels in the murky perimeters where the real converges with the synthesised and the manipulated. It is concerned with the notion and the very definition of primal experience in the digital age.

What I strive to create is the sensation of a restless image, agitated by the sensation of gestalt; these images oscillate in the parameters between things, causing them to flit between the natural and the artificial, the digital and the analogue, the still and the moving. They slip somewhere between the form and the formless. Between the ancient and the futuristic.

How did you get involved with Multiplied and Christie’s?
As an artist whose practice is very much involved with the notion of 'print', I became interested in becoming involved with Multiplied because I feel that it is essential that the preconceptions surrounding what 'print' is, or can be is challenged.

Printmaking is a medium which thrives on diversity - when using print orientated techniques and processes, one is not only taking on board its art history context where it often played a subordinate role to painting and sculpture, but also its industrial legacy – dissemination of information, publishing and advertising – the very types of images that infiltrate our daily lives in the contemporary age. Contemporary print discourse sits somewhere between the ancient and the futuristic, where archaic techniques and digital imaging technologies infiltrate one another to the point where the very definition of print is challenged and expanded. Printmaking is not only a mode of production, but is also a methodology, a process for approaching work

The printmaking course at the RCA embodies this notion, and the diversity of work produced within the department is only further evidence of this. The work shown at Multiplied will transcend the traditional notion of 'print' incorporating moving image, 3D work and artist books alongside 2D works that incorporate traditional print methods in innovative ways.