The third brief that set for myself was to create a series of monoprints in response to blindness - to attempt to convey blindness and its blurriness using a range of colours and visual language. As with the "Letters in Braille" series. I again used a gelatine plate with acrylic paints to recreate monoprinting at home while the university facilities are closed during the current lockdown.
What excites me about the prospect of monoprinting at home is that anything can happen and anything goes as the paint is rolled out, and each print is created, especially in this set of monoprints without the Braille element. Taking away that aspect, I now didn't know what was going to happen or what to expect. Colours can blend and do anything they wish to. The unpredictability is exciting! I chose my colours at random, as I always do for all of my work, as colours are not important to what I create - but tried to stick with the dark side of the paint box.
What worked in this brief? There was a varying degree of success with these monoprints. I utilised mark-making exploration as a way to explore my face and face portraiture as a blind person. I would feel my face in congruence with running a brush along the gelatine plate with some interesting visual language being created. The rolling of the paints onto the plate, blending together, successfully conveys blindness in a very dramatic way.
What didn't work? The legibility of the face portraits wasn't as clear as I'd like them to be, which may work in their abstract favour during the experimentation process, but may not hold value towards the final publication. I also didn't check if I was in portrait or landscape orientation before working and the portraits would have worked much better if I'd moved the plate differently so I had more of a surface area to work on. My gelatine (Gelli Plate) is old as it's five years old now, purchased during my time on the Access to HE course, and is unfortunately warped from heat, age, storage, and travelling. This affects the shape of the prints as they aren't perfectly rectangular. Professional monoprints at the university, with professional inks, would have a different visual language and a different quality to them. I could redo these when the facilities are back open but the question remains - when do we come out of the lockdown? Would I want to redo these again?
I need to be mindful of curating the content of my publication/zine and what I want to include in its pages. Is there value and aura to the work produced here because of the lo-fi outcomes? The hand of the maker? Or would higher quality canvas paintings that successfully depict my level of sight have more worth? A mix of both? This is a decision I need to make nearer the time in the development stages of the publication.
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