Perform/Print User Manual

Perform/Print is an online project developed by artists Stephanie Black-Daniels and Edward Bruce exploring the cross-over between printmaking and performance.

Working with six new graduate artists across a diverse range of disciplines over four months during the social distancing rules introduced during the Coronavirus pandemic, new prototypes for printmaking and performance were initiated from a creative dialogue between the lead artists and the artist ‘Responders’, generating six new commissioned artworks. Alongside the work made by Ed and Steph, these make up a Perform/Print User Manual, designed to stimulate, inform and introduce the overlap between performance and printmaking.

The project was mentored by Dr. Stephanie Straine, Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) in Edinburgh. The lead artists are extremely grateful to her for her time and the generous support that she gave to the project and to NGS for enabling this mentorship.

Perform/Print is generously support by Creative Scotland from their Open Fund for Individuals: Sustaining Creative Development 2020/21

Lead Artists

Stephanie Black-Daniels is a contemporary artist best known for her performance and installation work examining the dynamics between body, object and action. Her work combines sculpture, performance, video, drawing and print to explore ideas around gender, identity and exhaustion. Her work is both research-based and collaborative, using her own body, and the bodies of others to explore notions around gender, sexuality and somatic expression. Her work is deeply rooted in exploring the highly physicalized body, creating body objects, apparatuses, extensions and frames for performance actions. Her performance scores and choreographic approach looks to expand ways architecture, sculpture and the body can relate with universal roles, rituals and instructions. Materials found in her work are often linked to references in sport and manual labour such as steel, wood, graphite, rope and chalk.

Edward Bruce explores the ‘group state of mind’, by working collaboratively and individually with sound, print and performance. He is interested in the codes of behaviour employed in negotiation between opposing sides. To investigate this, he often places counterparts in a shared space where they are free to play and form cross-pollinated creativity. Many of his subjects are the group games, rituals and pastimes he remembers from childhood and adolescence. He ponders how they may still retain their relevance in a world of overlapping cultures and viewpoints and tries to discover their shared values and meaning for the present day.

Responders

Chris Connarty appropriates newspapers, public signage and ephemera to consider the instructional intent of visual media and its presence in public life. Through collage, drawing and printmaking, he plays with the text, style and content of found material. His work references commercial culture, news and the language of emergency in current events. In this body of work he considers the graphic language of print media as found in newspapers and comics. He is drawn to the tropes and forms of this media; the colour, material, text and punctuation.

Florence Eckersley is a process-driven, concept-loving printmaker. Printmaking is a medium that exists on the plane between the technical and the creative. In her practice she works in etching and installation to explore the performative and durational elements specific to printmaking as a process. In particular, the happenings between temporal dualities: movement and stillness, the event and the aftermath, and the duration between these states.

Thyme James is a Glasgow based inter-disciplinary artist, whose practice combines traditional notions of painting and printmaking with film-making and live performance. Their broad practice primarily focuses on the human form, both as subject matter and as a conceptual tool to explore gender within the arts, inclusivity, sexuality, and object-hood within a digital era. Dominant themes within their work stem from gender theory and philosophical thought. Recent works attempt to question and visualize the impact of online spaces on relationships, physical intimacies, and the body during periods of distance and isolation.

Lillian Ross-Millard is a Canadian video artist based in Scotland. Her practice operates as physical research adapted from years training in devised theatre. In 2016, she co-directed an award-winning experimental film Heart & Soul: S12 E10, at which point her practice shifted towards moving image work. By reflecting on symptomatic relationships between experience and the habitual movements of the body, she explores the contemporary body and its phenomena within a capitalist context. Parodying the scientific, the process is ultimately poetic, and is designed to remap the meanings we subconsciously assign to our daily choreographies.

Sophie Stewart is an interdisciplinary visual artist who challenges the acceptance of constraints caused by modern working conditions, highlighting the effects of precarity on the individual. Her work questions dehumanizing aspects of precarious work, by emphasizing the mundane, prolonging repetitive routines, and drawing attention to societal labels and expectations.

Tess Wood uses a collaborative approach to performance making. Her practice aims to explore the relationship between physical and vocal means of communication through somatic experimentation. She is currently researching how the body can offer us opportunities to contemplate topics such as gender, sexuality and power structures within a performance context. The accumulation of field recordings; documented physical movement and free-form writing inspired from site visits, aids the realization of the work.

Critical Friend of the Project

Elizabeth Tomos is a performance and live artist who utilizes the body as a means of image production. Recent projects have manipulated large-scale screen-printing and mono-printing processes performed in a range of live contexts. She graduated from Wimbledon College of Art with a BA (Hons) in Fine Art in 2009. Shortly afterwards she began working in Higher Education and has continued to do so ever since. Elizabeth is currently a lecturer in Fine Art at Falmouth University and is undertaking her PhD at Edinburgh College of Art which is investigating the integration of performance practices with printmaking.

Contact

If you want to find out more about Perform/Print you can contact Ed and Steph at:

performprint.projects@gmail.com

or message our Instagram page: @performprint.projects

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GLOSSARY

GROUP : PART : Component Action

SYSTEMS

TIME/SPACE

Score
Notation for sequencing and movement for performance and live printmaking

Choreograph
Sequencing a visual composition or performance

Notate
Making marks that make up a visual language of instruction

Move
A transition using multiple stages. Change in procedure

Map
Plotting a position in relation to the group to form a pattern

Grid-up
Framing action in sequence

Group
Arranging a visual composition with the same components in print – translated into performance

PROP

Frame
Division device for sequencing a visual composition or performance

Gate Using an object to create printed marks that make up a visual language of instruction indicating what is possible in performance i.e. ‘open’ and ‘closed’, ‘flow’ and ‘scrape’.

PLAY

Position
Set-play visual arrangement of a composition. In movement: performers split into teams relating through colours

COMMUNICATION

SPEECH/TEXT

Speak
Voice instructions or actions

Embody
Combining object/letter and body to create textual tableaux

Script
Capturing live printmaking and performance in a time based medium using writing movement and tools

Write
Movement to make script-likes marks using a stylus

List
Stacking script-like marks

Announce
Using letterforms to attention seek and communicate

INSTRUCTION

Instruct
Direction to act out rehearsed and scored actions

Wait
Static situation pending the resumption of a print or performative action

RELATIONSHIP

Connect
Communication between two or more bodies or objects (duet/quartet etc.)

Mirror
Doubling space and creating reversals

Split
Duet with mirroring. In movement: performers split into teams relating through colours

Translate
Creating a printed mark as an interpretation of a spoken word

BODY

MOVEMENT / LABOUR

Scrape
Using a tool to scrape into a wash of ink removing it to cause a track mark (related to ‘track’)

Track Applying physical force such as pressing combined with movement such as scraping to make an imprint: a state of motion made visible in the print

Brush
Using a brush to create a wash or ‘script mark in a monotype (related to ‘flow’) or transferring ink by rubbing across surfaces

Press
Using the body or object to make contact and mark the paper or disrupt another object or the space

Rub
Applying physical force such as pressing to make an imprint

Work
Applying physical force as an act of labour in performance and print

Play
Performing teamwork in order to explore work-play connections

Repeat
Action taken again and again in movement and impression

Machine-like
printed impression or action reproduced, repeated, distributed rhythmically and regularly

Flow
Organic mark-making using the body in a central way e.g. ‘wash’ created by the arm/ brush

TRACE

Transfer
language reproduced, repeated, distributed using printed impression (pressure and ink)

Ghost
print ‘noise’: secondary marks created after transfer from original to impression accumulating from successive layers

Document
Capturing live printmaking and performance in a time-based medium

EXPRESSION

Gesture
Utilizing forceful mark-making and action

Point
Using a printed mark or body to indicate selection or direction

… we spit, we bite, we bleed… we dab, we gouge, we resist… we impress, we imprint, we inscribe… we make contact, we reproduce, we sigh relief … This language, which is so evocative of the body, are all terms found in printmaking. To make prints is to inhabit “the closest geography available – the body”.^[1]Bodily prints can be found everywhere in the finger marks left on an ice-cold coke can, in the footprints left in snow, in the inky spots dripped from a broken biro. To live is to mark, to touch is to trace, which in turn is to print.

We are not left unmarked ourselves by this process. To be embodied is to be acculturated, our bodies are impressed and inscribed by the world. Our bodies are the matrix^[2]. This is a relationship of reciprocal touch, or interplay, of mutual expression and exchange, of movement between one being and another. We are marked and we mark.

Elizabeth Tomos

[1] Kathryn Reeves in Pelzer-Montada, R. (ed.) 2018. Perspectives on Contemporary Printmaking: Critical Writing since 1986. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, p.73
[2] Printmaking term for the surface that is constructed to hold the ink in order to be able to print.

Printmaking has the unique capability to disseminate mass communication in both discrete and graphically bold formats. It is the medium of whispered conversations of dissent growing in the alleyways, of pamphlets passed palm to palm in resistance, of posters lifted aloft clamouring for action. As a medium, it has the capacity to be both furtive and declarative. Indeed, “there is an immediacy and urgency within print that lends itself to an engagement with movements for change. The printed image becomes synonymous with the pamphlet and newspaper as a means to disseminate propaganda or simply ideas outside of the mainstream to the wider public”.^[1] The revolution might not have been televised but it was certainly inked! Therefore, there is an inherent theatricality and drama at play in printmaking which provides rich and fertile ground for cross-pollination with performance practices.

Listen. You will hear the breath as it is sucked deep down into the bottom of the lungs, summoned to push the voice forward via the squeeze of the diaphragm, it propels the breath up and out to make a sound, both deep and broad, that can hit the back of the auditorium. A performer is trained in the use of the body as a communicative tool; in how to project the voice and how to use each gesture and movement to carry layers of meaning. Performance represents, (re)constructs, and transliterates meaning from body to body; a cyclical and iterative process between performers and audiences.^[2] These characteristics of betwixt and betweenness, layering, and cyclical dialogue are highly relevant in an interdisciplinary space. To integrate the two mediums of Performance and Print is to constitute a fundamentally relational means of communication. This requires iterative processes of coding, encoding, and decoding meaning, as well as constructing dialogue through the exploration of overlapping sensibilities.^[3] A body becomes a typeface, quite literally typeset in flesh. A hand becomes an enigmatic emblem, perhaps a call to arms. A printed mark instructs a gestural action which in turn enacts a print. One medium breathes in, whilst the other breathes out. Symbiotic. Connected.

Elizabeth Tomos

[1] Coldwell, P. 2010. Printmaking: a contemporary perspective. London, UK: Blackdog Publishing.
[2] Alice O’Grady. 2011. Interactivity. In: Pitches, J. & Popat, S. 2011. Performance Perspectives: A critical introduction.
[3] See “Body” section for more on the ways that the language of the body and the language of print align.

Time passes; marked by the shadows that march inexorably around the base of the bollard outside the window, or the density of the sound of cars rattling across the cobbles in the street denoting that the office across the road has closed for the day. Objects, even banal ones such as traffic bollards, can become means by which we orient ourselves in time and, indeed, space. We undertake this orientation process in multitudinous ways through mapping, measuring, marking, sequencing, arranging, framing, and composing our experiences. We develop systems and structures to articulate, construct and manage phenomena. All is not ordered though; there is tension produced through opposition to these constructs, systems, and mechanisms. For example, resistance to the “tyranny of clock time”^[1], which constitutes perhaps the principally pervasive construct of the industrial age.^[2] Therefore, we operate in a continual cycle in which we order, reorder and disorder. We conform and we resist. Artistic practice has long taken advantage of this tension; excavated it, tested it.

For example, the construction of scores has picked its way across the territory of visual art since the Avant-Garde movements of the 20^th century. The term, borrowed from music, encapsulates a range of situations and usages within visual art practices but is bound up with the development of conceptual art and used as a possible means to test, negotiate, and critique systems. Examples of scores might include an artist providing visual or textual notation for the staging and restaging of a particular work, with or without their own presence. Alternatively, notation might be provided to an audience to elicit participation in the construction of a work. Equally, a score can be an impetus for studio experimentation providing an artist with rules or constraints to work within or a means of collaboration between multiple practitioners. Through these methods artists agitate the boundaries of phenomenological experience; they construct and deconstruct systems of control and power and challenge the tenets of authorship and ownership.

Elizabeth Tomos

[1] Mieke Bal. 2015. The time it takes. In: Smith, M. (ed). 2015. How to construct a time machine. Milton Keynes, UK: MK Gallery.
[2] Smith, M. 2015. How to construct a time machine. Milton Keynes, UK: MK Gallery.

Body

Expression

Movement/Labour

Play

Trace

Communication

Instruction

Relationship

Speech/Text

Systems

Prop

Time/Space