{"id":9427,"date":"2025-11-03T23:41:10","date_gmt":"2025-11-03T23:41:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bobgriffithsphoto.uk\/?p=9427"},"modified":"2025-11-03T23:41:11","modified_gmt":"2025-11-03T23:41:11","slug":"the-prints-formerly-known-as-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bobgriffithsphoto.uk\/?p=9427","title":{"rendered":"The Prints Formerly Known As Art"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

For my university project “A Photographic Portrait Of Shirehall”<\/strong> I have been making photographs of the buildings that were, until this year, the headquarters of the Shropshire County Council. The aim being to capture the essence of the building and hopefully add to the archive of imagery and evidence of its existence, in the event that it is taken down to make way for another development.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Shirehall from a drone.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Whilst I have been wandering around making images with my drone, digital and film cameras I’ve been noticing the mosaic tile frontages on the building and how they change colour as you make your way around the perimeter. Stood in front of a wall last week I had the idea to maybe do a “rubbing” with a piece of paper and a wax crayon. That mutated into using my printing equipment to create a relief print of the pattern featured on the wall. I thought about it for a few days and prepared my gear for this Saturday just gone.<\/p>\n\n\n

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I visited the Shirehall and selected an area of the wall where I had spied some damage the week before and then loaded up my brayer\/roller with some water based red ink and applied it to the wall in a large enough amount to cover a sheet of paper. Once I had enough paint on there I tore a sheet of 160GSM paper from a sketchbook that I don’t use and then pressed this against the inked up surface then spent a while pressing it against the surface with a smooth cloth to transfer the ink across.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At this point a dog walker passed and stared at me with a big red splodge on the wall so I promised that I would be cleaning it up once finished and he was interested in what I was doing, saying that “this will all be covered over with posh houses soon” before heading off. That was the only time that anyone bothered me during this escapade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The paper peeled off the wall but I was disappointed with the image not being dense enough. I decided to put more ink on the wall and rolled on some more before repeating the paper pressing process and pulling off a perfectly imperfect image. There were gaps in the print where the uneven surface of the tiles sat and I found this to be pleasing to my sensibilities. Whilst I was pressing this paper to the wall I thought about why the last print and possibly this one were not massively strong. Thinking back to Print Club at Uni with Laura and Simon I remembered that when we did Linocut prints we soaked the paper in water for a minute so that the ink got sucked from the lino into the paper fibres. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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