During the first UK lockdown in March 2020, as an art student I had no choice but to work from home. My usual place of work, Plymouth College of Art was out of bounds and without access to the richly equipped studios and facilities I felt bereft, uninspired and lost. At the time my plan had been to pursue my emerging printmaking practice, prior to this I had focused heavily on refining a watercolour mono print process. I began by trying to replicate this at home but without a press I felt the work was under par and trivial. So I needed to find a new way of working.
In this stuck state I began baking sourdough bread, which seemed a ridiculous distraction (as did the rest of the world!) but I now see it was my creativity coming out in other ways. Shortages of baking supplies and other items were an issue and it was hard to buy flour, eggs and toilet rolls. A briefing at college recommended ‘use what you have around you’, so I started to experiment making hand manipulated scanography prints of these products and packaging on a my new large-scale scanner printer. (I bought this printer to use for submission of my college-work via a physical sketchbook, but as everything had now to go online my new purchase was superfluous.) I decided to use the printer to make manipulated prints. These prints have been used as an enquiry into artistic form and inspiration taken from the artist book/sculptural work of Siobhan Piercy. I researched the artist Sol LeWitt, who produced instructions for wall drawings, a form of remote collaboration. (Sol LeWitt’s Instruction for Wondrous Walls – Improvised Life, 2015) LeWitt also took part in conceptual work by art curator Seth Siegelaub, “Xerox Book’,(ARTtube, 2016) this gave weight to the validity of prints made on a home printer. I deepened my enquiry into this process and eventually made a series of hand manipulated layered prints using egg boxes on fine art paper. My narrative of using items from around the home and my lockdown journey. Covid-19 made me change the methods in my practice, but it did not change my path. It forced me to dig deeper into my creativity, be more resilient and helped to understand myself better as an artist.
