#kitchen lithography

‘Untitled’ - kitchen lithography experiment on paper.

‘Artists often begin something without knowing how it will turn out. In practice, this translates as thinking through doing’ (Fortnum, 2013: 7)

I have spent the majority of my time in lockdown reading and researching, a luxury I usually shoehorn in to my practice due to time constraints with work commitments. That being said as a creative it has been interesting to work within the confines of my family home. Not only am I away from university facilities but I am also away from my own home. The only materials I have to work with are what I have to hand at my parents’ house.

I have struggled to motivate myself to make work in line with the projects I had set myself due to restrictions made by not having access to certain facilities. In particular I was disappointed in not being able to continue the lithographic pages that make up the Library Love Poem anthology. I have experimented with making lithographs at home using the kitchen lithography method (aluminium foil and cola) but not being able to make digital offset lithographs meant that this was purely exploratory and not appropriate to continue the project with.

After accepting that I would not be able to necessarily make work that directly contributes to the projects I had started, I decided that learning different homemade techniques would benefit my practice in other ways. Being open to learning new processes might offer new pathways in thinking through the act of making.

‘Untitled’ - sgraffito batik experiment on cotton.

‘Untitled’ - sgraffito batik experiment on cotton.

As well as kitchen lithography, other creative processes that I have explored include cyanotype, sgraffito batik and printing with plaster bandages. Each process was interesting to learn and though they might appear disparate there is an undercurrent of thought and decision making that makes this a cohesive body of work.

Experimenting with techniques unfamiliar to me reminded me of Jenny Rintoul’s lecture that discussed the symbiotic relationship between thinking and making. Rintoul introduced us to a number of ideas that discuss the integration of theory in practice. There is a back and forth dialogue between the two and so both are prevalent in the production of work in unfamiliar territory - ‘theory...is not prior to practice, functioning to inform it, but theory and practice are rather “imbricated within each other” in praxis’ (Nelson, 2013: 62) Therefore this mutually beneficial relationship between theory and practice might encourage ideas for later study when I have access to the facilities I am currently missing.  

Exploring these processes has also encouraged me to question why I choose the processes I do. Why was I unable to finish my edition of books when I could print at home? Why was it necessary to print the pages on an offset lithography press? What I enjoy about the lithographic process is its history rooted in the reproduction of the printed word; the affinity it has with the distribution of thoughts, theories and ideas. Replicating the process and indeed the aesthetic would be almost impossible to achieve from home, and so I look forward to being able to complete this project at a later date. Until this happens I would liken my current line of inquiry to that which I had during the last module; Developing Practice. I have an area of interest to explore but am continuing to find ways of how best to investigate it.

‘Untitled’ - monotype experiment on plaster bandage.

‘Untitled’ - monotype experiment on plaster bandage.

Wet pavement

Today’s direct monoprint. Done to restore some sanity after trying to follow online instructions for “kitchen” lithography.

Thing is, I don’t usually keep any wholly oil-based ink here: because I react to turps, I use Charbonnel Aqua Wash, which contains oil but cleans up with water, or soy-based Akua. Obviously neither is any use on plates awash with water. So I bought a tube of cheap oily ink for purely experimental purposes, and it proved to be pretty vile. The process didn’t work, and I was a bit slow to realise the ink was the problem. Gave it up as a bad job yesterday, then tried rolling up the same plate with Aqua Wash today. It performed beautifully up to the point where water would have to be involved, and satisfied me that the ink was entirely the issue.

“Goodnight”, Kitchen Lithographs, 2014-2015

I posted more about this series when I originally posted the first one. Click here to read more about the process I used.

http://www.atelier-kitchen-print.org/products-page/manuelsproduits/handbook-of-kitchen-litho/#more-535