Using Joiner photography to make a screenprinted panorama
Ten years ago this month I was in the final stages of the MA in Fine Art Printmaking at Winchester School of Art. My final show featured my biggest work to date, a 5 x 3 metre panoramic 'joiner' of Calshot Beach near Fawley Refinery in Hampshire. It was made from 18 overlapping prints using a combination of silkscreen, etching, photo-etching and collagraph but started life as hundreds of photos overlapped to give a sense of both the scale and detail of this beautiful location. The process is documented in the captions on the photos.
The opportunity to have the print room pretty much to myself throughout the summer and the undivided attention of Caroline Hill, the printmaking technician extraordinaire is a great memory. I'm still enthralled by the coast as a rich seam of inspiration for my prints but this is the project that started it all.
It was displayed alongside a stop motion animation of calshot beach, a section of which can be seen here projected onto plastic sheeting to reflect on the amount of waste which washes up on the beach. I also completed a ‘found’ series of transfer prints with graphite which were prints taken from items found along the beach. The process of documenting and transfer printing then drawing onto them turned them from discarded waste into intriguing objects worthy of contemplation. Project blog coming soon.