INCISION EDGING Experiment One
SKIN LAYER EXCISION PLATE ENGINEERING
SKIN LAYER EXCISION PLATE ENGINEERING
17 April 2026
INCISION EDGING Experiment OneINCISION EDGING Experiment One:SKIN LAYER EXCISION PLATE ENGINEERING
...it was a gotograph born of hand concocted oil inks, a hybrid chemical skin... and worse still... faux-leather vinyl...
AN EPISTOLARY SUMMARY:
"COME UP TO THE LAB," he said...
“Incision edging?” they whisper.
“...sure sounds Kinky...”
“....but wait: did he say vinyl composite laminates?!”
“...he's clearly insane I'm telling you!”
“...and what's this about gotographs?”
“Surely he’s making this up.”
And yet — here stands the evidence.
In my laboratory of hundreds of placemats (and no dinner guests), adhesives, solvents, and questionable decisions, I attempted to create a "Skin Layer Excision Plate" on a semi-porous unevenly ribbed faux-leather composite laminate...
The plan was simple: apply a PVA hybrid solution, press it flat, cure it, and then cover it haphazardly with random vicious random cuts revealing the fleshy ink‑hungry underlayer below the leather like epidermis...
The pick and peel method used to excise shapes was doomed to fail; the hybrid bond was too tight. It clung to its skin like a creature unwilling to shed...
So I devised "Incision Edging" — a method of coaxing the surface into absorbing ink by gently grinding between the incisions, allowing controlled excisions without destroying the laminate’s delicate anatomy.
The result is a print snatched from a plate that did not want to exist.
Edging and stripping: both noble arts in the forbidden laboratory of Excision...
____________________
This is my first presentation of prints I made of a Skin Layer plate that required me to experiment with a technique I later called "Incision Edging".
Developing all sorts of new methods to transform these unique and complex plastic surfaces into printing plates has been an exciting adventure that has kept me occupied quite intensely for the last month. To test all the new experimental plates, I developed a way of making "excised" or "stripped" plates by creating an abstract lattice of crossing curved and straight lines horizontally and vertically. The many warped spheroids, crescents, polygons and triangles that are created by the crossing lines give me a lot of possible places I can excise them from the plate. Most often every second shape is removed so that the corners of the remaining shapes are touching meaning at least half of the plate is "stripped".
Some of the methods I invented ease the process of stripping. In this case, the extremely sheen, flat and shiny layer of cured PVA solution consisting of wood glue mixed with a dash of pouring medium which had been cured under the press revealed itself perfectly hydrophobic and oleophobic. ...Unfortunately the bond was so tight that it was hard to remove using the "pick and peel" method.
Undaunted, however, I invented "incision edging" which had me passing a dremel multitool over the surface, which turned out well because the little round head on the spinnning tool ground down the hard upper layer and made it absolutely ink absorbant... and I was able to push right up to the incisions and stop exactly there. The contrast between the uneven ground down layer between the shapes and the shiny upper layer ended up making a reuseable plate that absorbed and repelled ink just as intended, producing a gradient of colours across the prints using the oil-based inks I had made "in lab" specifically for this wild experiment.
...And at last I was able to prove that both edging AND stripping are artforms!
TAGS:
#makinganimpression
