Silk screen printing

The brief was to explore the notion of identity and what it means to me. I went back to where I'm from and looked at old photographs. I had explored this theme briefly in term one. I had made ceramic maps of where I'm from based on old ordnance survey maps. I went back to the maps. I explored more in depth my home place Turraheen. I took photographs of the old creamary across the road. The creamary, the school, the river and the bridge are on all of the old maps. The creamery has been disused for about 20 years now. My great grandfather gave the land to build the creamery on. I found the census document in his handwriting that that he would have filled out in 1911. I printed it and added a present day census of all of us that are in the same homestead today. I made a series of silkscreen prints using the census, ordnance survey maps of Turraheen and imagery of the creamary as it is now.

The whole process of silk screening, getting the flippin images on the screen took ages.First we had to clean the screens, dry it and then I put emulsion(the green stuff ) on the screen, let it dry in the dark cupboard. Prepare the images. Rub cooking oil into the images so that they're transparent. Also with the image of the creamary window and the tree I wanted to try some posterisation so I had to use photoshop to get the image in light, midtones and dark. Then I had to put the images onto the screen using the lightbox?! I cleaned the screen and I was ready!

Putting the screen in place

Tape up the parts I wasn't printing. Put a strip of printing ink at the top of the screen.

Flood the screen.

washing the screen to change colours