Eat, drink, print

coffee.wine.print. - cyanotype print with coffee and wine spills.

When you think of making site-specific art, you probably think of place as part of an external landscape, something ‘outside’ of yourself. I certainly have until recently when I started making art on flattened out cardboard boxes from things I had eaten, drunk or ingested. Place as an ‘internal’ landscape of consumables.

These ranged from boxes of Scott’s oats (for the morning porridge), herbal teas, chocolate biscuits packets and small paracetamol boxes (for the painful knees) - they have wonderful embossed braille dots on them.

I’ve been creating monoprints, drypoint etchings and cyanotype on these boxes but the other day I tried out a new experiment. The famous “what if” popped up. What if I try disrupting the process of cyanotype exposure by adding liquid spills to it.

I have tried creating cyanotype prints in the rain, and while the rain made lovely dotty circles, the blue completely washed away. This time I exposed some ordinary A4 artist paper first, washed a little of the solution off, then add some red wine remnants from the bottom of a bottle .

The result was a soft rose glow on the paper. I was intrigued! I had one more piece of paper which was coated with cyanotype solution so I first pressed it into a puddle of spilt coffee, then exposed it using some folded paper shapes which made sharp shadow edges.

When it had exposed for over an hour in the sun through the window, I then washed it out a little and added spatters of red wine. The result (pic above) came out even better than I expected.

It also has that little square shape at the bottom, a nod to the what3words map app. which was my original inspiration for printmaking and map exploration as part of my MA Arts + Place at Dartington Arts School. These experiments point me in a whole new direction which I will use as a starting point for my next residency at Oxford next month.

Half exposed cyanotype print with red wine added before being completely washed