Making a 3D Paper Impression
2025
Before my trip to Bali I created the following artwork as a series of 5 works that I submitted for inclusion in the 49th edition of the "The Hand", a Magazine that promotes the work of experimental artists working in reproduction media like photography and printmaking. I told the editor that I would make the multimedia artworks after returning that these QR-code artworks would link to. To my surprise and joy, four of the five were chosen for inclusion.
After returning, I've had quite a few weeks of desperate creation and web design as I've been preparing these works intended for people to view as in response to the images appearing in the magazine, they scan the images to see on their phones multimedia work that is referenced within the artworks. It was a unique experience and getting it right was very important.
This is the artwork that appears in the magazine and which I made the complex film about intended for viewing on a smartphone:
The film I finally ended up making (and which is being processed while writing this commentary), used all of the elements I had introduced in the artwork. It went, however, much further than I had ever expected in realising my vision of "method as metaphor" which is the underlying theme of all works in this particular series. Furthermore, it is the ideal representation of the material I am intending to make in the future for my "AT YOUR OWN PERIL" website. The primary conceipt of this website is that the method itself, the process of the production of art, IS the art; that the products you end up with at the end are just the end of a complex process - interesting but incomplete if you don't consider the whole process of art making.
...And this particular piece of art, one that incorporates so many other individual artworks including graphic art, films, GIFs and musical compositions, becomes very much an artwork in itself... as well as teaching something that I invented and actually perform in real life still today.
This has so many different artworks wrapped up into it and it is the embodiment of the "art as process" conceipt that forms the instigating stimulus to all my recent work, more specficially the AT YOUR OWN PERIL make-it-yourself website that includes actual templates to download for projects people can plausibly attempt themselves (no matter how terrifying and dangerous I make it all sound in the instruction films).
So this artwork, although appearing to be a joke, references a set of techniques that you could actually learn to do. It all started you see with a refusal to use the cutesy patterns that came with die-cut embossers to press into paper. Fuck that! I had to work out my own way to do this. This artwork is an absolute celebration of the moment when I printed my first 3D impression with a quite elaborate and deep "impression folder" that was made with rigid moulding agents. It was a long and difficult process, but I worked out how to do it and I ended up with something really unique: a method to make rigid impression folders that can withstand the pressure of an etching press without destroying not only the paper but the moulds that are pressing against the paper, resulting in quite phenomenally detailed and exact reproductions of carvings I made into a surface.
These images were from the film I made at the end of 2024 to test the new method of making sturdy impression folders. At the time, I tested three different folders. "The Old Man" was the only one of the three which had TWO rigid plates. The first impression went to Max Brooker who had agreed to participate in my interactive art project.
The most significant underlying theme behind artworks like this is related to the negative effects neoliberalism has had on contemporary culture. By taking the emphasis well and truly off the final products that people can sell and can imagine actually means they "own" the art in any real way and therefore don't need to understand it, renders the ridiculous worry that people have about AI art to be toltally superfluous.
I mean, who the fuck is worried about what a machine thinks up in a second that just imitates stuff? Concentrating on the complex processes that go into making artworks by hand goes to show how ridiculous it is that people are genuinely worried about it and just goes to show how fucking awful neoliberalism has made people become. People really think that just because you can't make something that can be sold and serve the economy, that what you are doing has no value. Fuck that to hell and back!
This is poking fun at both the art world which deigns to decide what is art and what is not, but also to a decade of undiluted and disgusting neoliberalism which has created a generation of willing consumers, all ready to buy the products that are advertised in glossy packages (a bit like this deliberate parody of craft merchandising, n'est-ce pas?).
The bright colours and the flashing images reference directly the advertising of the eighties which would convince me as a child to become enthusiastic about creative products. There is a sense of excitement that such images would evoke. Often the thing I ended up getting hold of, often by cajoling relatives to buy them for me, would end up in disappointment. I remember convincing my father to buy me a toy printing press that you could use to the print with. It was a useless piece of plastic that you could scratch letters on to. Nonetheless, there were books and packages that did encourage my creativity and left me this sense of anticipation and that resulted in my actually being more creative, so this is probably why this feeds back today into the courses I design. I'm parodying them but at the same time paying these memories a degree of respect because as much as I despise them , they are still an essential part of my past...
...But here's the thing: all the courses, templates and downloadable material I make for my AT YOUR OWN PERIL are completely free. So you get the point, right? I stand firmly against the system which is trying to get me to add value special value to things I make that I can use to make money with.
Not everyone is interested in money. I certainly aren't. I didn't become an artist to make money!
In fact, I didn't become an artist at all.
I ALWAYS was one.
