Saturday, February 11, 2023

un-titled

 

Completed in 2022 (private collection).

Screenprinting and drawing/painting on cradled birch panels, with screenprinted and etched sheet steel bonded to the centre panel. The three panels, printed separately, are then fastened together to create one piece, 17" x 71" x 3/4" (43x180x2cm).

The images in this work were gathered a few years ago on a trip to my friends' cabin on Lillooet Lake near Pemberton in British Columbia. The cabin is completely off the grid, with electricity supplied by a small hydro generator driven by water from a nearby river. The two end panels are images of the river looking upstream and downstream from the point where the water for the generator is diverted into a feeder pipe. The central image depicts the view from their living room across Lillooet Lake. 

As usual with these pieces, each of the original images was cropped into smaller sections, then enlarged to the scale I wanted by making transparencies of each section on a Canon printer in black ink, which were then spliced back together to create a larger transparency, from which I could make a screenprint stencil. Each panel had several of these full-size stencils on individual screens, each of which could be further modified as necessary and printed numerous times to produce the layered results I was trying to achieve. These results were frequently modified between printings by adding layers of thin transparent washes with a paint roller, or sanding areas away to expose colours previously printed, or by drawing into or wiping away the wet ink immediately after printing. The central panel on steel presented different problems. I wanted to stop using etching mordants that posed health risks, namely acids. The solution was to use an Edinburgh Etch for steel, which is ferric chloride plus food-grade citric acid and water in the correct proportions for etching steel (recipes for different types of metal are available on the web). I also wanted to use water-based non-toxic screenprinting ink as the resist for non-etched areas, which worked reasonably well. Even so, the etching process could take hours at a time, but it was definitely a safer route. The screenprinted resist would eventually begin to break down, so it was necessary to clean the steel completely and reprint it several times as the etching proceeded over several days. Etching steel this way tends to create a dark toothy surface, not dissimilar in appearance to an aquatint, but I wanted a lighter surface. The solution for that was to use a mouse sander after the etching was completed to bring out layers of tone, right back to highly polished steel in some areas - not dissimilar to working on a mezzotint plate. As this steel plate was intended to be a one-off for this piece, I am curious to know how it might work as a printing plate for an edition, but that exploration can wait for another day. In collaboration with the friends for whom the piece was intended, I wanted to include some subtle elements of personal history, but we decided to work with elements of the history of the landscape itself.

the text seen under ultraviolet light
The final screenprinting on the two end panels is barely legible under normal light. It is text derived from a document called 'The Declaration of the Lillooet Tribe' which dates from May 10th, 1911. The document describes the ancient relationship of the Lillooet First Nations to their traditional territory which dates back thousands of years before any European contact. It is also a protest to the colonialist government of the time about how their territories - and their people - were being treated badly by the exploitation of settlers. The document was signed by sixteen chiefs representing the various groups who inhabited different areas of the territory. I wanted to show that the land and its history could not be separated, but to also indicate the danger that, as decades go by without any resolution of Indigenous land claims in British Columbia, the historical connection could simply disappear (hence the title of the piece being 'un-titled'). The ink I used to 'imbed' the Declaration onto/into the landscape is only fully visible under ultraviolet light, and even then it's only partially legible. In theory, if the piece is exposed for a period of daylight, the text should become more visible briefly as day turns to night (appearance and disappearance), but most art is not normally exposed to long periods of daylight due to the fading effects of ultraviolet light on ink. So the viewer may be invited to use a handy UV flashlight to get the 'full effect', which is somewhat fitting - needing another source of light to see what should be plainly visible.

I hope that viewers who are able to see the piece in the right light will read the date attached to the document and the place where it was signed by all the chiefs: Spence's Bridge, BC, May 10th 1911. Looking up that place and date on the web will take one almost instantly to the full text of the Declaration and its historical significance, and to current information about the Lillooet  (Lil'wat) First Nations. (https://lillooet.ca/Golden-Miles/Images/GMHfinallorez_Page_04.aspx)