This Place: Collaborative Print Project. IMPACT 11, International Printmaking Conference and exhibition, Hong Kong

Peer reviewed contribution. A collaborative printmaking project (with Pauline Clancy) that explored text and image through screen printing. The 27 prints produced formed an installation and was accompanied by a handmade book. The project was made in response to Buckminster Fuller’s text ‘Utopia or Oblivion’ (1969). Here Fuller advocates for a sense of awareness and urgency not only for our relationship with ourselves, technology and the environment but also with each other, to imagine better as a collective task.

The exhibition is an installation consisting of a series of collaborative screenprints and artist books. While language is at the heart of this project, dialogue is also inherent in the collaborative process where the aim is to collaborate across individual artistic boundaries captured in the moment of printmaking. Fuller’s proposal for a more equal and fair society is reflected in a moment of despair where he learned ‘You do not belong to you. You belong to the Universe.’ (1989, Sieden, Lloyd Steven, pp.87-88)

This necessary relinquishing of self is brought into focus in this collaborative printmaking project, where the indexical signs presented become both passive and active, absent and present, yours and mine, a necessary middle ground where distinctions give way for another moment of language making. The project was planned as a physical exhibition, but was then exhibited online due to Covid-19