Description
Judith Stroud Box of Tricks 2 AP 38 x 29cm £95.00
I have always loved traditional museum science specimens and collections and when I was a child I had an ancient uncle who boasted of being a lepidopterist. He had many mahogany framed boxes with glass lids containing lots of dazzling and fragile butterflies and moths impaled on spikes.
Their delicate and iridescent shimmering wings are still vivid in my memory.
Of course this is not acceptable nowadays, and I hate to think of the destruction of all those beautiful insects.
However when I started making collagraphs and experimenting with blind embossing, I thought it would be fun to make my own Collections and Specimen Boxes, because I could not only fill them with “scientific specimens”, but I could include memories and ideas, and objects and people that I wanted to keep close and remember.
Collagraph is a printmaking technique which operates, as the name suggests, on the basis of collage. The physical activity involved in creating a collagraph plate is the interaction with a selection of materials of varying textures. It is a particularly robust, direct and unfussy type of printmaking and the surfaces created are relatively unpredictable. Indeed, much of the joy of working with collagraph lies in the tremendous scope there is for innovation and experiment.
The nature and breadth of Collagraph as a means of creating uniquely rich and interesting printed imagery makes it one of the most dynamic innovations to take place within printmaking in recent decades. Unlike other intaglio and relief methods, which rely on a set of one or more highly technical processes, Collagraph is a process which enables you to work directly with materials, and to explore the qualities of those materials.
The collagraph plate can be made from ‘liquid’ materials, which are painted on to the plate or applied in a liquid or semi-liquid form, with a brush, palette knife or squeegee, such as PVA glue, ceramic tile cement or epoxy resin or from materials which are cut-out and glued down, for example, tissue paper gauze, scrim and fabric.
