Cyanotypes and Screenprints

New work 2023 - as yet untitled

Hiatus - “a pause or break in continuity in a sequence or activity.”

All this past month I’ve been divesting myself of commitments. A clearing out, cleaning up, finishing off, tying up of loose ends. It’s a kind of hiatus, a break in the fabric of time that is allowing me time to breathe.

I have talked a lot about the importance of the “pause” in my online courses and mentoring. The time to look at and assess what you have been creating to date. What is worth keeping, what needs repurposing or throwing away. I have experienced this pause in my life many times, yet each time I forget what it is like to go through it in order to get to the other side.

This week I have finished a series of artworks made during my artists residency in Iceland last year. I needed to find ways to bring my cyanotype postcard size artworks out of the world of lived experience and into the world of art. This has meant mounting them on canvases wrapped in hand made paper or layering them on top of other artworks.

During these humid summer days I start early in the morning, sometimes even before breakfast; thinking, moving pieces around, reconfiguring collage compositions. With only three stitched postcard size artworks left to mount, I ran out of backing paper. I began a hunt through my paper drawers and found a long strip of screenprinted paper in indigo blue, my favourite colour, which would go well with the cyanotype images. I cut it into three strips and used these as the background layer of the collages.

When I looked at the finished series, I found time looping back on itself. These were the electro-magnetic equations so described and drawn by James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1979), the Scottish physicist who discovered electro-magnetic radiation. His four physics equations were the basis of my artworks for my BVA graduate exhibition in 2012.

I have often thought that these radiating circles were like cosmic portals. Since then I have visited Iceland twice and felt that Iceland itself is something of a portal. Combining images made in Iceland with cosmic portals, it’s as if time is looping backwards and forwards through my artworks.

These cosmological images are about energetic vibrations. For me they visually represent the world as a web of energy lines; connecting us with each other, with the non human world and with the cosmic galaxies beyond.

When I struggle to make sense of the world or my purpose in it, I realise that it is a constantly evolving journey which I have written about for years. Pinpoints of pulsating inquiry on the energy meridians of my body. This artwork or that exhibition, this poem, or that play; all were energetic pulses that captured my feelings at the time, briefly illuminating them through creative offerings.

In my paper drawers, I also found another image I made years ago, a combination of screenprinted images on handmade banana and linen papers. I called this piece Entropia, (from the Greek, meaning turning toward or transformation). I remember wanting to convey that feeling of reaching outwards when feeling trapped, breaking free of constraints and striving upwards. It reminds me again of the ‘pause’; that inbetween time of letting go, leaning into the unknown, diving into a cosmological portal with only trust as your guardian armour.

I did a quick search of my old blogposts to see what I had already written about seeking purpose and found these three blogposts: Good Vibrations, from January 2022, Ordering Chaos, from May 2021 and Saying Yes to Chance, from June 2021.

These remind me that I have been here before, and written about these same feelings before. It’s all a journey circling back, like a spiral getting closer each time to your souls purpose.

Entropia 2015 screenprint on handmade banana and linen papers.