The day I recieved the award for my entry for the community project ‘ Wall of Resistance’ at Brent Town Hall thoughts around the use of art started again. The council website states: ‘ Brent’s community have helped to create a wall of resistance made up of postcard sized images based on the theme stand up to Hatred. The aim of this project was to urge everyone to look at their behaviour towards others, to understand how hate is directed against different minorities in Britain today and to explore how we can help make our communities stronger and safer’ ( http://www.brent.gov.uk/arts.nsf/Festivals/LBB-21 accessed 30/01/09)

The Wall of Resistance project seems to me a most positive, inclusive and humanistic act - that through images, music, poetry and football( !) and on that day, citizens of many faiths and ethnicity gathered to honour the victims of not only the Holocaust, but of all - genocide. I know from my master’s degree research in graphic arts and the visual language of protest, that the 20th century stands as the tragic record holder of more systematically implemented genocides of any centuries. Has techonological advances made us more savage? Yet can socially engaged art create intercommunity dialogue and be a reminder of that food, shelter and freedom belong to us all?

In order to convey the eternal, one needs to bow down to the ordinary. Art underpinned by cultural humanism is the act of looking closer, of stopping to meet the eyes of the stranger who we ignore, most of the time, because we are too hurried to acknowledge what we do share - birth, hopes, work and death. Cristopher Rush writes in his book ‘ To travel hopefully - journal of a death not foretold’ ( 2006: 91)) ” I embraced the Yeatsian credo that you can only attain to universalism through what is near to you and what is meaniingful to you: your nation, your village, the cobwebs on your wall, the hailstone that is the journeyman of God, the grass-blade that carries the universe on its point.’ Looking closer and closely - may be one aspect of an honourable practice.

Success in a creative project is not an unconcious act. An honourable practice requires freeflow creativity which is grounded in a ethical core combined with craftmanship and clearly defined aims. So far, the Puzzle Project is proving to be the most effective in my explorations in developing a sense of community and engagement of strangers without the overtones of a community arts workshop. Building a giant puzzle together,like a Buddhist sand mandala, without the participants knowing each other, seems to spark ongoing questions and musings over what ‘together’ actually means in practice. The Puzzle project, in its quiet and slowly progressive way, unfolds to become an embracing, and positive shared activity , where the community has been created through kick-starting curiosity over what kind of 10 x 3 mter puzzle can be built by strangers coming ‘together’ by making but not meeting.

For more information and show time; www.puzzleprojectuk.com

These might be the three dirty words of the contemporary art world, emitting a pong of outdated notions, such as craftmanship, community and collaboration. The one who seeks to combine craft with art, may be without imagination, feeling the need to collaborate with the zeal of an art evangelist saving the community!
Yet, we could be moving through a time of revision, questioning what consumerism as a hegenomy did bring us, countered by the ideas of craft based skills, collaboration and community as part of an artist’s identity.
Slow down then, and become rich in possesing skills. Invest in relatioships such as learning as an apprentice or grow in vision from collaboration or nurturing a sense of community. This is the year, to become unfashionable. I start with mixing my own inks, and by making notes for complex ways of printing as I test my patience and attention to details. Then, it’s all in the image. It ’s all in the relationships that make life possible.

Etching became one of the most popular forms of printmaking techniques with the printmaking revival in the mid 19th century when weekend- artists began to crowd the highly skilled engravers in the printmaking field.

John Phillips speaks in his dissertation that since etching being a comparatively easy technique to learn, it was soon embraced by amateurs. Etching can be a quick bag of tricks - where textural and tonal images are easily produced. The amateur may not embrace the process of building a skill set of craftsmanship as a basis for their work. The process of becoming an apprentice to a master printer- and learning complex printing techniques by working side by side with the master, to learn skills by practice and application, seems to have vanished in today’s art education.

Therefore, I decided to become that apprentice, to acquire printmaking skills by learning from master printers and through being in collaborative printing studios as one part of the research on what defines an honourable practice. One emerging thought , is that craftsmanship is a fundamental part of an honourable practice.

The peony ( 1.2 metres by 1. meters, 3 plates woodcut ) is part of that apprenticeship process. I have now worked with Monumental master printer Stefan Beccari for two years in learning large scale printmaking - and oversize woodcut techniques. It is only by being there- fully present - I understand what to do- applying and discussing the work while conquering the five ton press, unwieldy large sheets of paper and rolling the ink for hours.

Does the decision to seek out craftmanship in printmaking make me dull? A luddite? An uptight artist and happy enthusiast sseking refuge in the craft? Or does treating printmaking partially as a craft to learn - make me more of an artist- separating me from the sensationalist artists - where the concept and text and the obtuse work witha sloppy presentation and clumsy drawing - may make them the hyped up amateurs?

My emotive driving force behind the research is profoundly rooted in a personal struggle in believing to what degree making prints i.e. art, is of any use at a larger societal scale. While the making of the print itself and the constant drawing which precedes any of my images have undeniably sustained and focused my existence which emerges from a challenging past it has also created an internal conflict of both seeing that art can occasionally absolve trauma, while feeling , based on an inherited Swedish Lutheran work ethic that as art may also be a form of luxury and a narcissistic part of society’s cultural life, and that it holds no greater value than mere consumption. Ironically, it is this very counterpoint of my own dilemma, poised between a compulsion to make prints and simultaneously doubting art’s meaningful application which drives me to interrogate to what degree socially engaged art may either be a form of therapy and community evangelism or to be a practice which genuinely may contribute to both individual or communal transformation.
Since the print is so curiously placed between commerce, community and self expression, between the utilitarian and the political, the print is is, in the pockets of time, the art form of the underdog, and its themes appear to embrace universal concerns such as freedom, and suffering.

I recall, in particular, the dark work of Bosch and Brueghel as well as the dreamlike, lyrical and exotic woodblock prints of Hiroshige. The Ukiyo-e prints and the Bosch’s and Brueghel’s work demonstrate poetic lines drawn from daily life, of the fisherman hauling his nets and women buying fish and peasants toiling. The ordinary becomes extraordinary in its details in these prints, and stand in contrast to Tolstoy’s idea of art made since the renaissance to ‘titillate the bored rich’ transmitting only ‘ pride, sexual desire and the weariness of the world.’
Hanfling : Philosophical Aesthetics (1992:182)

The dilemma of my practice is to make more than images imitating life displayed in not so accessible galleries but to test , through the art work itself, what role does printmaking play within the context of the idea of an honourable practice? Why do I need to anchor my practice in a purpose beyond my own compulsion to make visual work where the creative exploration solely justifies the art? Eric Gill, the British graphic artist, asks himself what is the purpose of him doing any work adding - that wouldn’t it be better of he was a carpenter making chairs? He wonders: ‘Or suppose my mind is seething with ideas but that I have no adequate reason for making anything. The flattery of rich connoisseurs does not seem adequate. The placing of things in museums seems absurd. The mere exhibition of my own idiosyncrasy, even if the exhibition be well paid, seems a foolish proceeding (….) Would I not rather make something really useful to ordinary human beings? ‘
(1983:54)
Eric Gill stands as an example of a life devoted to art as an honourable practice and I have been lucky to have worked and met another , such as Bob Blackburn, yet, I am anguished by the use of artists’ images in a world challenged climatically, economically and morally, and wonder, as Adorno, that ‘The culture industry fills empty time with more emptiness.’? O’Connor( 2000: 260)

However the outcome of the investigation, I am certain that printmaking as an art practice enriched , and continues to do so, in knowledge and adventure , my life through discipline, craft and connection with ongoing collaborations to a worldwide community. The end result may be that in being exposed to new ideas in drawing and printmaking, my creative life undertakes a positive paradigm shift as it has in the past Initially, the print, for me, was a way out. Today, it is a way forward.

However, it remains to be seen to what degree the print proves to be an honourable practice and if it can effectively be a socially engaged art form.
If so, I may, in the end, be able to reconcile the visceral lyricism of Hiroshige’s Japanese line work, the darkness Bosch and Breugehl and the transcendendent humanism of Goya’s etched images of war atrocities with a Lutheran work ethos. I am committed to making prints as a contribution to society regardless of my doubts, yet I do wonder if, as O’Connor writes, that
‘Art makes apologies for its failures to act directly. Art could not do so even if it wanted to. Surely the political impact even of so called committed art is highly uncertain.’ (2000: 249)

The issues surrounding the morality of art continue to challenge.
Plato, in ‘The Republic’ argues that art is ‘mimesis’, or imitation leading the artist to be an imitator of life, ‘conjuring abstraction’ which calls for heroism without being him/herself heroic while speaking of matters they have no direct experience of and therefore, artists do not have a social role nor use. Plato argues that a person’s occupation should only exist if determined by the needs of the people forming the state. When art is displayed in galleries or performed on the stage it is difficult to access by hindrances such as class and money. Showing my ‘Twente Identity Robe’ in a gallery in a fashionable part of the Dutch town Enschede failed to connect or engage the very people of Enschede’s market which had provided the visual starting points for the print. The robe was mere a pretty thing- of little meaning.
Art becomes an escape from society and a poor reflection of its ills. Poetry and paintings may be ascribed to be noble, but seduces us by consuming suffering as a pleasure, and protest as entertainment. Hanfling in ‘Philosphical Aesthetics’ (1992: 301 -305)

The dilemma of my practice is for the work to be more than an imitation of life, more than a feeble protest displayed in not so accessible galleries. If printmaking is to play a role within the context of the idea of an honourable practice, it needs to reconnect with its historical past where the strength of the print was multiplicity and wide dissemination, may it be through newspapers or the internet.

Gerald Rauning writes in his book ‘ Art and Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century’ that ” actors in the art field instrumentalise social transformation as spectacular conditions just the finance their art”. Humility removed in the era of commodification, not even socially engaged art escapes a utalitarian agenda.