CFPR Vitrine Printmaking Exhibitions at Frenchay Campus
The CFPR vitrine exhibition is on display at the Centre’s Frenchay Campus HQ (W Block). The vitrine area is a space for all team members to display their work from current or past projects, organised and curated by Niamh Fahy with Lizzie Field and Mari Bear. The exhibition is currently scheduled to change on a two month basis, with work from the upcoming visiting artists programme and IMPACT 12 to be incorporated. Please contact Niamh in advance if you would like to visit the exhibition as there is restricted access to W Block.
Initial exhibitions featured Book Arts Research by Associate Professor Sarah Bodman, Kind Materials Research by Senior Fellow Dr Laura Morgan and a reflection on colour research by Professor Carinna Parraman.
From Stone to Print – a recent exhibition by Abigail Trujillo Vázquez, Early Stage Researcher
In the 21st century the Cultural Heritage field is an epistemic arena where timeless concerns are forged into contemporary ways to enquire on who we were, how we make, who are and were the others, and above all, perhaps, how do we face change. The science and technology of cultural heritage today is an interface between the past and the future. Technological innovations allow us to record, codify and reproduce different aspects of significant objects, so we preserve them in time. Even confronting the paradox that material technologies are improved and subsequently replaced while the objects continue to age.
Uncountable material achievements have been lost in the turmoil of human history, destroyed by nature or war, they will never be known to us. Yet, Cultural Heritage designs high quality taxonomies, to enable other human beings or even other intelligences able to understand what we have managed to recover. There are known technical and political limitations of this era, yet an optimistic view about the digital future drives the aesthetic adventure of handling and experiencing traces of the past.
Even if there is not a single way to value heritage, the present popularity of archaeological sites and anthropology museums show that society has a keen interest in the ancestral past of humanity. Moreover, heritage exhibitions are a conceptual sample of our very present, not only because technology evolves, but because the decolonisation of collections is a matter of constant reflection.
Through this exhibition I share a reflective process on different aspects of a heritage-related problem: printing ancient Mayan reliefs. On the surface, it is a problem-solving research: how to best print the appearance of modelled stucco and carved limestone. But at its core, it is an attempt to reconcile different ways of understanding image reproduction, one by printmaking, the other by digital printing. It is also a way to demonstrate the value of crafting the materiality of the ancient, and to engage with their meanings on a personal level, in order to show that conversations between science and art can go beyond a mere sharing of techniques.
This a sampling of my work in progress towards the recreation of the frieze of the Palace of the Stuccos and a wall of the Temple of the Jaguars, based on the work of the Victorian artist Adela Breton from Bath. It showcases samples of limestone brought from Yucatan, ingredients for pigment making, printmaking tools, and test prints, references to digital materialisation, notes, proofs of concepts and overall different technologies and materials to assist the scientific imagination.
