The philosophy of printmaking is a patchwork of minor narratives in the broader context of fine art and aesthetics. Frequently discussed are the ideas of origin and copy that Walter Benjamin wrote about under the keyword of aura in the context of art and mechancial reproduction
[1]—an essay about cinema that is frequently misattributed to photography and print culture. Origins and copies, however, have the unfortunate precedent of bringing to mind other binary oppositions, Eve is a copy via a rib of Adam, or Yin as the moon’s reflection of the Yang sunlight. I sought to escape from these narratives of binary relations where one side is always disadvantaged through the dualism of splitting and subordinating.
I worked as an assistant to the master ukiyoe woodblock carver Motoharu Asaka for six years and like many in his generation, a large proportion of his work was dedicated to producing perfect hand-carved and hand printed replica ukiyoe. This started a creative process of considering what the replica is in relation to that old story of origins and copies. With replicas, unlike copies, you create uncanny new objects that are removed in time and space from their context, like 21st century pictures of Edo scenes produced by artisans who love karaoke and beer.
In fieldwork in 2022
[2], together with
Agustín Spinetto I motivated the metaphor of replica by researching the objects, textures and sounds that had crossed borders with women in their middle and later years who had immigrated to rural and semi-rural parts of Japan decade(s) ago and had no plans to leave their adopted homes. By creating replicas of their tactile and spatial experiences with silkscreen prints and ceramics I hoped to explore the ways that migration is like building a replica of a life elsewhere—it might have some relation to a previous phase of life but it is fundamentally an act of creation rather than duplication.
In the final exhibition accompanying the defense of the thesis, I drew on thinkers like Benedict Anderson
[3], Partha Chatterjee
[4] and Christopher Pinney
[5] who tangle around the conversation of print and Imagined Communities. This includes the foundational notion that print culture is implicated in creating the synchronisity of consciousness necessary to forge and sustain sentiments of national belonging. In the context of digital fabrication technologies that expand printmaking practice from its “20th century belonging” as an adjunct to the theory of painting, I put forth the idea that post-digital fabrication-enabled printmaking through its virtual–material translation facilitates and performs the kinds of transnational fluid communities that no longer belong to linear geographies. In the context of increasing numbers of people living cross-border lives, the intersectional marginalisation of immigrant women and the elderly in Japan’s aging society poses urgent questions.
The final work is a replica of a bus stop in Brighton with its proportions adjusted to the tatami sizes of construction materials in Japan where I have lived for almost half of my life. At its feet are the monster toes of a left behind monument on the Geidai campus signaling the quantum unity of patina-colored landscapes that remind me of both locations, colliding in quantum refractions through sensory experiences into the memories of internationally distributed (un) belonging. Such an understanding is supported by my reading of Karen Barad's material discursivity
[6]—a kind of quantum death of the author—
in the sense that it is not only discourse that fragments, deconstructs, sediments and re-emerges unevenly and improbably, but material itself does as well. Situated in the entrance hall of the exhibition, near Yoshioka Tokujin’s contemplative benches, the work becomes a temporary resting place for those in transit to other spaces.
Finally, upon closer approach the work reveals itself as made completely of paper pulp, the material of printmakers, performing the material ecologies that ground the history of printmaking in Japan through chains of makers coordinating to support the image of the final print. The forms, completely analogue in presentation arise from 3D data that created polystyrene and 3D-printed molds for the pulp to form in.
Working within the tentative and experimental field of artistic research which teeters as it tries to find a voice as an academic discipline, I pushed academic methods as creative material to try to reveal complexities about these topics that are often overlooked or reduced by empirical and text-based academic traditions.