Brand New Print Series: Refracted & A Study in Black
I’m getting ready to release two new print series, Refracted and A Study in Black.
They look quite different, but both have come out of the same process of trying to understand my work a bit better: where the shapes I’m drawn to come from, how photography fits into what I do, and how all of that eventually finds its way into my painting and graffiti.
Refracted
Refracted started with photography, but really it started with me trying to understand what inspires my graffiti.
I’ve always been drawn to photographing buildings and spaces. It’s often the scale of them that catches my attention first, but also the shapes, the way different parts of a building intersect, overlap or sit against each other.
I started wondering if there was a connection between the things I naturally photograph and the patterns and forms that appear in my graffiti.
So I began going back through photographs I’d taken and studying them differently. I would sketch them out, isolate shapes that interested me and move those shapes around to see what happened.
The idea wasn’t to make a print series. It was much more of a study and a way of developing ideas for paintings. I wanted to understand where some of my visual language was coming from rather than just making shapes because I liked how they looked.
I suppose I was trying to make the work feel more authentic to me by tracing some of those influences back to their source.
As I worked over the photographs, though, I realised the images had started becoming pieces in their own right.
That led me into experimenting with them as a kind of collage, using screen printing and gel printing to physically pull the images apart and put them back together.
That process became Refracted.
The photograph is still there, but I’m not particularly interested in preserving it. It gives me the structure to work from. I can separate things, move them, change their scale and rebuild the image until it becomes something else.
You might still recognise something of the original place, but that isn’t really the point. I’m more interested in what I can find inside it.
A Study in Black
A Study in Black came from a different direction.
These started as original paintings on paper and are much more stripped back. Instead of the colour and fragmentation of Refracted, I was working with black and seeing what I could get from that limitation: the marks, textures, density and differences that start appearing within something that at first seems very simple.
When I decided to reproduce the paintings as prints, I chose C-type photographic paper.
I could have made them as traditional fine-art prints, but that didn’t feel quite right to me.
Photography has always been a big part of how I look at things. It’s also how I captured a lot of the groundwork that eventually fed into this work, so reproducing the paintings photographically felt like a way of keeping that connection.
I also like the slightly strange journey the image makes.
It starts as a physical painting on paper, gets photographed, and then comes back as a physical object again, this time as a photographic print.
There’s something about that process that feels very natural to the way I work. I move between photography, painting, printmaking and graffiti quite a lot, rather than thinking of them as completely separate things.
Bringing the two together
Refracted and A Study in Black are very different visually.
One is full of colour, layers and fragmented images. The other is deliberately reduced.
But for me they come from a similar place.
They’re both about looking more closely at the things I’m already drawn to and trying to understand why I’m drawn to them. Photography runs through both series, sometimes as the starting point, sometimes as a way of collecting information, and sometimes as the final form of the work.
More than anything, making these pieces has been a way of understanding my own visual language, particularly the relationship between the places I photograph, the shapes I notice and the forms that eventually appear in my paintings and graffiti.
Refracted and A Study in Black will be released as limited-edition prints soon.
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