RCA Printmaking Exhibition Explores Notions of Nature
Royal College of Art Printmaking staff and alumni are at the forefront of an exhibition exploring our understandings of geography, natural histories and landscapes, opening today in London.
against Nature, curated by RCA Printmaking Senior Tutor Finlay Taylor, presents a body of contemporary and historical print work that poses our understandings of geographies, landscapes and natural habitats as a series of political and ethical notions.
Helen Chadwick’s Et in Arcadia, a bold and highly detailed marble photo etching of a beetle challenges ideas about preservation and value, while David Cross’s M20 Open Day, depicting the M20 just before it was opened, poses questions around development at the expense of the countryside.
Taylor’s own work, Making Plans Before Heading South, and Bob Matthews’s The Future evoke a sense of the cosmic as they expose ideas of space and travel as human constructions. Tim O’Riley's books, meanwhile, inspect the moon, our notions of it and gaze towards it from the position of earth’s surface – as well as our efforts to draw it, photograph it and film it. His books track our desire to reach it and the cultural objects that surround those missions.
Among the RCA staff to show work are Head of Printmaking Jo Stockham; Visiting Printmaking Lecturer Mark Harris, Printmaking Tutors Nicky Coutts, Tim O’Riley, Dick Jewell and Bob Matthews, and Head of Painting David Rayson, who will exhibit his first woodcut, The Plant Gall. RCA alumni to present work are David Cross, Kate Scrivener, Dan Howard-Birt and Serena Korda.
According to Taylor, the focus on print across artists and its subtle innovations and applications helps ‘pry open some complexities of looking at nature and print’.
‘Printed ideas examine the artist's concerns. Print is used as a peculiarity by the makers to address its audiences and as a history of media developments that sustains testing and invention, from books to stamping. The use of print within this exhibition involves another recurrence – that of mountains, plants and the moon,’ said Taylor.
The exhibition opening will be accompanied by the launch of a publication of the same name, with short essays by David Cross and Nicky Coutts as well as page images by Denis Masi, Finlay Taylor, Kate Scrivener and Dick Jewell. There will also be a symposium on 21 May with curator of prints at the Victoria and Albert Museum Gill Saunders, senior lecturer at the Slade School of Fine Art Dr Joy Sleeman and artist David Cross. Â
against Nature (PrintMare project 2) runs from 23 April – 29 May 2014 at the Camberwell Space
, Camberwell College of Arts
, 45 - 65 Peckham Road
, London SE5 8UF.
Open Monday – Friday from 10.00–18.00. Closed weekends and bank holidays.Â