restricting: i am not sure what i would have been working on if i could go anywhere but today i am working from a state of restricted movement. i started by gathering from my immediate environment without too much thinking – taking images, video and some fairly random things from the garden. i know i have already discussed the gendering of the garden space but today i am working here because i have less options (gendered origin i suppose). maybe the real reason i am working this way is because i just want to start physically making and today that means printing anything at hand. i think the idea of a ‘restricted landscape’ could be an interesting thread to follow but i am not going there intentionally, just working instinctively (gendered attributes again).
the making process: so much for woking randomly, it took longer than i thought to expose the screens as i ended up returning to the wallpaper bitmaps because i was curious about how it would sit with the first stencil. i repeated crops of my prints using ‘layout’ and tested them out as wallpaper, which is kind of where i left off last weekend. i think the cropping is effective and could be interesting to print on different edges of 2d and 3d forms. some images of today …
reflection: i had fun repeating my images post printing but the repeating of the image could also happen at bitmap preparation stage rather than after the printing process. the digital and the analogue inform eachother. it might be interesting to repeat a ‘nothing’ as much as a ‘something’. technically there were a few things i could improve on such as pressing the object first before exposing it so that the stencil is sharper. i could also have exposed on a bigger screen. the screen i used has been in a dark box for months and i expected there to be problems but it exposed and washed very well.
not all random: it was not all random this weekend as i also got down to a little reseach this morning and spent some time looking through opportunities that might suit what i do, plan to do, have done, have never done. i came across a few opportunities – one suited to a print series i worked on in april, another that i might be interested in working towards and a further one that might be a bit aspirational. think i’ll continue the open way of working before i work towards anything.
elaine crowe 
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