Drawing on a transdisciplinary field, lived
experience in the printmaking studio, and genealogies of knowledge that inform the artisan practices of lithography, Serena Smith’s ongoing research considers the language of stone lithography. Shaped by the coupling of technology and a thinking body, the written and printed outcomes of this research develop a lyrical ambiguity that spills out from the structures of communication, and use language as
material and medium, to explore a serendipitous dialogue between the embodied
practice of stone lithography, and the poetic realms of voice and text.
Heteroglossia The
fine dexterous hands and observational skills of Carswell and Maclise, would
have been well suited to the art of lithography. When drawing their anatomical
illustrations on stone, they may have also felt some affinity between the
lifeless skin of their deceased subjects and the limestone. Laboriously
prepared to resemble a sheet of paper, pressed against their own flesh would
have been a smooth, cold, dense matrix, occasionally veined with iron oxide
deposits and freckled with the fossilized patina of micro-organisms. A fragile
substance, vulnerable to abrasion, scratches, and the burn of acids; and
sensitive to warmth, humidity, and the grease from a fingerprint. In corporeal
kinship with the human body, a sedimentary rock in part composed of the skeletal
detritus and petrified remains of distant microbial relations. ISSUU >>
Listen: a litho-phonic encounter
A litho-phonic encounter. VIDEO
Attending to the Sound of Sonorous Stones Whilst she is not depicted in the studio, from the
photograph it is possible to imagine Skiold, immersed in the labour of graining
lithography stone, at home in the gritty sluice, her body tipping and leaning over
the graining sink, hands moving around the stone rhythmically with the ease of
a practised partnership. The abrasive scouring noise, not unlike the spade of gravel
thrown into a tumbling cement mixer at the end of the day, is something she would have easily recognised. IMPACT 12 Printmaking Journal (conference proceedings) >>
On Stone
Under a clear
blue sky the dragonfly takes its last migration through breezeless air.
Touching down momentarily on still water, too late to know that this salty pool
won’t quench a thirst, its fragile wings are pulled down into the sedimenting
basin of an isolated lagoon. Just out of reach from the coast nothing
leaves the stagnating pool and warmed by the sun the water slowly evaporates.
Under the same
sky 150 million years later, in a territory now under the jurisdiction of a
place called Bavaria, the once calm reef is now land with a settled population.
Business thrives in a town becoming renowned for its rich deposit of finely
sedimented limestone and quarry beds are excavated to feed a growing demand for
this now valuable natural resource being traded in the printing industry. And
once again, by chance, the small creature’s last journey comes to light, each
detail of its flesh depicted in the smooth surface of the soft limestone
matrix. Inscription: the Journal of Material Text -
Theory, Practice, History >>
Ekphrasis:
inscriptions on wood and stone
As the drawing
progresses I wonder if the hands of Celtic scribes also tired, whilst scoring
the lines of Ogham text into fragments of wood. Cutting short repeated grooves
against the grain an effort would have been felt, different to that which
allowed the tool to willingly travel along pathways of growth. Perhaps
they too made use of a device to control the errant gesture, and aid production
of measured lines of written language (...) Traversing the topography of this
substrate, the tracks of these movements cluster and intersect. Lines of
travel collide and converge. And as the tracing and re-tracing repeats and
returns, left within the membrane is a manuscript that documents journeys taken
and territories charted. Laid down in the process is the fragmented text of
notation - a choreographic inscription in which might be glimpsed, an arabesque
performed in the nexus between generative systems, time, and the intentions of
life on the move. IMPACT Printmaking Journal >>
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