Pressing Matters, by Oluwatobiloba Ajayi
Helen Cammock, Ingrid Pollard and Camara Taylor Soft Impressions
Dundee Contemporary, Dundee
7th December 2024 – 23rd March 2025
Ingrid Pollard’s print series Seventeen of Sixty Eight includes twelve blind embossed images taken from pub signage across the United Kingdom. The series focuses on recurring references to ‘The Black Boy,’ a term used in the name of over sixty-eight pubs across the UK. At Dundee Contemporary Arts’ group exhibition Soft Impressions, ten of Pollard's embossings are on display, but you have to strain your eyes to see them. Like ‘The Black Boy’, the works hide in plain sight. Blind embossing describes the process of impressing an image onto damp paper without ink. It relies on our perception of depth in the absence of colour. I arrived at the gallery in a flood of early afternoon light, allowing me to trace the raised edges of Black boys, enslaved figures moving through the landscape and racial epithets in gothic fonts – stereotypical imagery mined from across pub signs, stained glass and tavern coins. The strain of reading these images parallels the insidiousness of their source material. These insignia can easily slip our gaze, but they remain present whether we register them or not. This issue, and it is one, of visibility, runs through Soft Impressions, a show that centres on Pollard, Hellen Cammock and Camara Taylor’s shared investment in the medium of printmaking. While the revolutionary nature of the technology originally lay in its capacity for fixed repetition, Taylor, Pollard and Cammock leverage its potential for pictorial manipulation to better foreground their singular visions.
Printmaking, the process of producing potentially replicable images, first began in China in the ninth century when images were made from movable carved wooden blocks. From its start, its methods were reliant on the precision, pace and sensibility of its maker. Its faculty for replication always left room for a possible modification, as a subtle shift in block position or ink consistency opens up another way of understanding a picture. In the fifteenth century, the printing press was introduced to Europe which allowed identical images to be mechanically produced from a single matrix of carved wood or metal. Thousands of pages could be printed per day, compared to roughly fifty by hand. Coupled with the increased availability of cheap paper across the continent, the ability to share ideas through both text and image expanded irrevocably. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the techniques of etching, engraving and lithography became favoured for the reproduction of portraits. Concurrently, prints that sought to illustrate racial classification and hierarchies began to circulate during The Enlightenment, such as the plates included in Mancunian physician Charles White’s An Account of the Regular Gradation in Man, and in Different Animals and Vegetables; and From the Former to the Latter, published in 1799. His account posited that Caucasians were more distinct from animals than other races and that Africans were the human species genetically closest to apes, using engravings to illustrate.
The word ‘stereotype’, derived from the French adjective stéréotype, originally referred to a printing technique used to duplicate typography. Over time, its meaning evolved to describe a fixed image or an oversimplified idea. Printmaking, like any technology, is a conceivably propagandistic tool. Yet the very process that allows for a reductive reproducibility provides considerable latitude to subvert its methods and favour difference. Printmaking techniques – etchings, screenprints, letter press, digital printing and woodcut, to name a few – rely on a number of environmental variables: oiliness, moisture, light, temperature viscosity and pressure. For example, I know that I tend to etch with a lighter hand, meaning the groove of my lines is not as deep and therefore does not hold as much ink. To compensate, I often introduce extra padding when working with a press, increasing the pressure on the paper and ensuring I draw out as much ink from the plate as possible.
The artists in Soft Impressions resist the capacity of printmaking to replicate charged imagery without critique. Their elected processes are sensitive to their hands and environments, similar to how digital technologies – algorithms, social media, search engines, etc. – transfer and reproduce information to reinforce the preferences of its users (or developers). In printmaking, our individual inclinations affect the resulting image. Yet you could conceivably be scrolling through Instagram unaware of the algorithmic machinations that are sifting through content to offer up what might be most appetising to you. There is a larger imagined degree of separation between ‘user’ and ‘machinery’ in algorithmic technologies, which perhaps increases their potential for harm. In her 2019 book, Race After Technology, sociologist Ruha Benjamin coined the term the ‘New Jim Code’ to describe the use of new technologies that predictably deepen existing social inequities ‘but are promoted and perceived as more “objective” than previous systems. She offers a number of examples to demonstrate: how airport screening systems are more likely to flag those with ethnic names for additional security checks, or how a recidivism risk algorithm, used to inform policing practices, wrongly predicted individuals who would reoffend, with the formula more likely to flag Black defendants as future criminals. While Benjamin’s arguments focus primarily on digital technologies, her discussion of technology’s role in reflecting and reproducing ideas about race is inseparable from the historic involvement of printmaking in propagating ideas of racial difference.
In Camara Taylor’s Untitled (re/decomposition 4), Untitled (re/decomposition 3), and Untitled (re/decomposition 1), she pushes the ouroboric quality of the medium to its conceptual edge – enacting and documenting how environmental variables affect the printed image. The works consist of reproductions of Robert S Duncanson’s paintings of the Scottish landscape, submerged in water, Jamaican rum and Scotch whisky. Duncanson was an African-American landscape artist who travelled to Scotland with the support of Abolitionist patrons. Taylor’s use of his paintings creates an encounter between Duncanson's romantic vision of the Scottish landscape and her biographical relation to both Scotland and Jamaica. The works have a pernicious quality: the liquid pool on the surface first suggests a varnish, but kneeling down on the floor to inspect it further, the print bubbles and warps and a sporing grey mould eats at its corners. In an exercise of intentional poisoning, the liquids interact with bacteria in the gallery to slowly deteriorate the work. Eventually, the pollutant will overtake the pastoral composition. This becomes evident in a final silver gelatin photographic work Untitled (re/decomposition 4, 1871, 2021, 2022) from which the landscape has disappeared completely, swathed by a cloud of grey-black mould. The photograph documents the final product of these submerged reproductions which Taylor produces by exposing an emulsion of gelatin and silver salts to light and chemically developing the resulting noxious image. The artist reclaims a procedure often used to reproduce pre-existing information as an inlet for more subjective representations: in mirroring the decomposition process, Taylor adulterates idyllic notions of the Scottish landscape that endure in the present, drawing the messier histories of the Highland clearances and Scottish involvement in Jamaican plantation slavery, quite literally, closer to the surface.
Both printmaking and digital technologies are conjecturally impartial tools nuanced by their real-world use. As Benjamin describes, developers of AI, algorithms and big data seek to hide their built-in bias, but this concealing of direct involvement is less possible for print technicians. In another work by Ingrid Pollard, Regarding the Frame, the rectangular indentations of the paper signal the metal plates used to produce the etchings. The text components sit flush against the paper's surface, indicating they have been screen printed, with the subtle variations in the letters’ opacity suggesting moments when the pressure has slipped as the ink met the paper. The effect is a composition that hints at its construction. These subtle disparities disclose the quirks of its maker, or the conditions of its making, and imbue the work with a flair of chance.
Across the exhibition, the artists combine analogue forms of printmaking with digital tools. In a work by Helen Cammock, responding to activist and Scottish mill worker Mary Brooksbank, Cammock uses a computer numerical control milling machine to laser etch Brooksbank’s poem onto a piece of wood, granting physical presence to her poetic affirmations of the working-class. Cammock also screen prints Brooksbank’s words on jute, connecting Dundee’s Labour movement to the colonial project of jute production that tethered workers in Dundee to what was then British-ruled Bengal. Moreover, Pollard’s Seventeen of Sixty Eight draws from photographs taken by the artist that are then isolated and treated digitally to create compositions for the embossings. Cunningly, Pollard collates these stereotypical depictions of ‘The Black Boy,’ not to further codify the stereotype, but to allow for more considered observations of the unnamed figure. The artists work productively across the spectrums of representation that printmaking allows for to refuse a technological propensity for oversimplification. The works are favourably enriched by the legibility of individual predispositions, channelling the skew of the artist to enhance both the process of making and the works' conceptual thrust. Cammock, Taylor and Pollard are in full control of their medium, milking its technical adaptability to enact socio-historical critique and trouble clichéd imagery.
In the central gallery of Soft Impressions, Ingrid Pollard’s cascading Toile de Jouy wallpapers are screen printed with archival images of Ghana and photographs taken by the artist in Normandy and Lancashire. Again, there is a merging of the old and the new, and the wallpaper is delicately hung from the ceiling or pinned against the wall, pooling into unfurled rolls of paper. It strikes me as an act of unbridled generosity: these enshrouded rolls that sit softly against the floor – symbolic of the idea that the works might carry on forever, whether or not we are privy to the edge of the picture. In a world oversaturated with images, the pace and demands of printmaking demands an embrace of delicacy. The inherent volatility of the medium – the need to consider a multitude of variables at every turn – offers a balm to techno-utopian ideas that attempt to separate technology from its user or its societal condition. Printmaking offers a figurative alleviation of the illusory claims of algorithmic technology. It reminds us that technologies are not neutral, and they never have been. Perhaps there is a way to better name our positions and work graciously, with our hands readily legible.