A certain critical period

A project in moving image and etching, undertaken as Expanded Print Resident at Graphic Studio Dublin

A certain critical period, moving image (from etching, carborundum, monoprint), 2025. Please check the quality setting (click the ⚙️ symbol in the bottom right of the video) and consider selecting e.g. 720p or 1080p.

Seen in retrospect, yes: I have regrets. There was a certain critical period. I see that now. During that period, your grandmother and I were doing, every night, a jigsaw puzzle each, at that dining-room table I know you know well ... Every night, as we sat across from each other, doing those puzzles, from the TV in the next room blared this litany of things that had never before happened, that we could never have imagined happening, that were now happening...It did not seem (and please destroy this letter after you have read it) that someone so clownish could disrupt something so noble and time-tested and seemingly strong, that had been with us literally every day of our lives.

What would you have had me do? What would you have done? ... Would you have marched? For some reason, there were suddenly no marches. Organized a march? Then and now, I did not and do not know how to arrange a march.

Excerpt from Love Letter by George Saunders

In George Saunders's Love Letter, set in a post-democracy USA of the near-future, a man writes to his grandson to give him advice on dealing with the detaining of one of his (the grandson's) friends by the government. The Grandfather's letter quickly broadens into an explanation and an excuse (but not quite an apology) for how the recently-democratic America had slid into autocracy, while he watched on helplessly. While it drips with love for his grandson, the grandfather's letter aims above all to justify his inaction during that "critical period", and to justify his advice to his grandson:

I advise and implore you: stay out of this business with J. Your involvement will not help (especially if you don’t know where they have taken her, fed or state) and may, in fact, hurt. I hope I do not offend if I here use the phrase “empty gesture.” Not only would J.’s situation be made worse, so might that of your mother, father, sister, grandmother, grandfather, etc., etc.

I arrived at Graphic Studio Dublin aiming to expand my etching skills while also producing a moving image piece that capitalised on the unique mark-making potential of intaglio printmaking. Master printmakers Robert Russel and Niamh Flanagan were extremely generous with their time and advice, introducing me to carborundum and more advanced aquatint techniques such as spit-bite and sugar-lift. Sometimes arriving in a new studio, where it seems everything is done slightly differently, can make you feel clueless even with techniques with which you have experience. At Graphic Studio Dublin however, the fantastic facilities and welcoming environment allowed me to slot right in and get to experimenting.

The moving image piece above is formed from some of the hundreds of prints that arose from these experiments. Around the time of my second visit to Graphic Studio Dublin, I head Love Letter on the New Yorker Fiction podcast, and unable to get the story out of my head, I folded it into the project. I was working with drawings of my uncle reading the newspaper; these became images of the grandfather reading the news of America's decline, or agonising over the "love letter" he needed to write. The raven represents a messenger bringing a warning, although in Love Letter they represent an illusory normality:

"we still did not really believe in the thing that was happening. Birds still burst out of the trees and so forth."

Soft ground etching lines (over carborundum marks)

The negative marks enabled by aquatint etching

1/1

While it became conceptually entangled with Saunders's Love Letter, this is also simply a piece of work about the dizzying possibilities of mark-marking in intaglio printmaking. Robert and Niamh introduced me to the beautiful abstract potential of carborundum marks (used with such flair by the likes of Hughie O'Donoghue, Gillian Ayres), which open my movie (above left). Meanwhile, soft ground (above middle) allows for grainy lines and not unpleasant "foul-bitten" tonal areas, and aquatint enables negative marks, an ability to paint with light (above right).

Like the marks made by the grandfather in Love Letter, the marks here are transient. Each time the video is generated it is different - a different future is possible.

Etchings

The moving image piece has become part of a still-developing body of work, including paintings and etchings, of the same name, a certain critical period. I made two of these etchings, pictured below while at Graphic Studio Dublin, and the other at St. Barnabas Press in Cambridge. They relate to aspects of the moving image piece, evolving or refining them further.