Description
Judith Stroud | Spell 2 1/6 S | Collagraph | 56 x 38 cm | £90
Some of my larger collagraphs were inspired by particular materials such as fish fins, fish skin and snake skin.
I used to make leather garments and found some left-overs from my sewing days. I had some pig-skin, and a cured salmon skin which was leather like and scaly, so I used them, together with seaweed, to make the collagraph “Night Flowering”. It is a sort of zoomorphic plant, perhaps a bit magical.
I was interested in using bits of fin from a beautiful red gurnard I was cooking, so I salted it and dried it in the freezer. This was used, together with salmon skin and scales, in the collagraph “Spell”. This again is a magical charm of some sort, cooked up in my cauldron, made visible and preserved for future use.
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.
