Which tools did you use for the creation of this piece?
Heatpress, aquatint, ferric chloride, burnisher.
“I love process of collecting things, whether that be objects or images and sorting through ideas through image making.”
What was the creative process behind it, from the beginning until it was finished?
The work was made using multiple etching plates. The first started as a drawing I did several years ago. I transferred the image onto the copper plate and lightly etched the lines and aquatinted the plate, placing it in the ferric chloride and stopping out sections to create six layers of tone in the image. I burnished back sections to add highlights in areas such as the hair and the cushions. The images of the tile scattered around the work came from broken fireplace tiles I collected from a block of flats set for demolition. I scanned in the pieces and transferred them onto copper using a heat press method, aquatinted it and etched the plate. I printed them on rice paper and cut them into individual pieces. I inked up the drawn etching plate and printed it while using a chine-collè process to meld the prints of the tiles into the paper. I played around with the placement of the tile pieces quite a bit and settled on this composition.
What were your references, influences or inspirations during your creative process?
I was inspired at the time by the relationship between objects and emotion. The tile pieces not only reminded me of the lost home but also contained a semiotic trace to the female body. Combining the drawing with these pieces allowed me to communicate a sort of fractured femininity.
What did you enjoy the most about the process?
I love process of collecting things, whether that be objects or images and sorting through ideas through image making. I also love the etching process itself. It’s methodical, labour intensive, requires problem solving and is so rewarding when everything comes together at the end.
What was the hardest thing for you and how did you solve it?
I was using a different heat press to the one I was used to and the heat press transfer wasn’t quite working with the usual settings so it required a lot of trial and error to get the right settings. It was a good reminder that although process driven, printmaking always requires experimentation and finding what works best for different nuances of each machine.
Lucinda Bird is a Sydney based printmaker working with found objects and images to investigate how visual histories construct and inform identity. Bird aims to reappropriate forgotten narratives in order to explore ideas such as memory, place, femininity.