Kensington and Chelsea Today 21 October 2011 (See PDF)
In one of the written contributions in the accompanying catalogue, David Ferry poses the question ‘Fried or boiled?’ as being the only options open to a man in a B&B. He makes the point that there are a myriad ways of cooking eggs, just as there are a limitless number of ways of printmaking. The title of the show is taken from a song by Roxy Music, and, taking that literally, presents the viewer with an array of diverse processes which come together to produce some very different works.
The curator Michael Iveson has included a work by the late Shelagh Cluett, which, at first, does not seem to fit into the parameters of printmaking, but the labyrinthine pattern of the ground plan of an Indonesian temple, Borobodur, on a sandblasted slab of granite was achieved digitally, and fed into the machine, so was, effectively, printed.
Works by Lewis Betts and Bruce McLean use different substrates, in the former’s case, a print taken from a routed sheet of plywood, and then overdrawn, whereas McLean’s Low Level Levitation of himself wedged between two walls in 1970, has been photocopied, pasted onto cardboard and laid on the ground.
Diana Taylor has used both oil and acrylic paints, ink, varnish, Letraset and gloss to produce two highly colourful pieces. (Those of you who thought Letraset had gone down the same rabbit hole as Cow Gum and Rotring pens, think again). Sonsoles Marquez has screen-printed images of ice-floes onto a rough sheet of lino, entitled Floating Water, some 2.8m x 2.0m wide. An Gee Chan’s work is probably the most conventional, in that he has screen-printed directly onto paper, while Ashley Rich has three geometric plaster casts mounted on foam boards, which do disturbing things to the brain, if stared at for too long. Apart from his own digital prints called Intersections, Michael Iveson has collaborated with Ian Wilkins and Christina Wrege in a project called the Cardiff Sessions, using both lithography and offset printing, to produce their own versions of exquisite corpses. In their case, there were not too many cooks to scramble those eggs.
Don Grant