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 |
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)