Sorcha Mackenzie and Nicholas Hubicki explore worlds adjacent to ours, worlds produced through imagination, research and the labour of construction. Through this exploration of just the other side of where we are now, they challenge us to look again at our environment and to look again at the nature of printmaking.

In her fascinating account of printmaking Jennifer Roberts (2024) asserts that one of print’s essential qualities is alienation. Print processes, she argues create mediated forms of estrangement that separate, for example, the original gesture of the artist and the gesture on the final artwork. The multiplicity of processes that printmakers use to create an image, produce a series of interruptions before the final image emerges. It is: ‘displaced, deferred, delegated, reversed, obscured’ (Roberts 2024:168). Rather than distorting the image, these controlled and staged interruptions produce dynamic images which work across the real, the resonant and the spaces in-between.

These printmaking practices are both physical processes and processes in time. Roberts describes them as “the unique ways that printmaking generates meaning at the level of fundamental physical operations…..the physics of print, and … the poetics and politics that might emerge from that physics….technical matters are not “merely” technical…The act of making is its own form of intelligence, and when we recognize this, we can begin to explore the deep imbrication of the technical in the conceptual, the philosophical, the theoretical, and the political.” (2024:3)

In this exhibition this ‘imbrication’ becomes particularly obvious. Since 2014 Baldessin Studio has collaborated with the State Library Victoria and two generous donors[i] to offer an opportunity for printmakers to immerse themselves in the library’s extensive collection of books, objects and documents as well as accessing the facilities and expertise of Baldessin’s St Andrews Studio. The work that has emerged from these fellowships are unique examples of research-based printmaking.

All art making includes a research process. Even the most spontaneous, intuitive art arises from an experience of looking, memory or experiment with materials. The studio of any artist is also a laboratory. But the research of the Fellowship artists takes this process out of the studio and makes it explicit. What is fascinating is the way ‘creative research’ and ‘library research’ merge in these projects to reveal new dimensions of what Roberts refers to as the “physics of print”. While Roberts focuses on the physical operations of printmaking, research-based printmaking emerges from an additional series of physical, intellectual and creative operations that extend the act of printmaking in time.

Sorcha Mackenzie began her project with an interest in architecture and history which developed from her 2022 VCA Masters project on dystopian and utopian architectural assemblages. It was also fuelled by her experience of seeing creative spaces she had grown up with, like Melbourne’s Metro nightclub, disappear in the face of voracious new development. She set out to document not so much these buildings but their resonance.

Nicholas Hubicki’s Chimera series arose out of his photographic practice where he has played with various formal structures to explore the reverberation of the past within the present and vice versa. In the context of one of his earlier projects he has called this viewpoint “the portal of elsewhere”. He notes: “as is the case with any aperture, any mode of seeing: something always remains outside of vision”.

Both artists although pursuing separate projects take us through this ‘portal of elsewhere’.

Mackenzie began her project exploring historic architectural plans in the library’s archive. What began to fascinate her was a set of “unidentified plans” in the collection. She began to work with these plans as ciphers of the forgotten substrate of cities, and to explore the connections between the drawing practices of architecture and the drawing practices of printmaking. The soft and subtle collision of fine lines in the print series that emerged from this exploration suggest an archaeology of the unknown and the forgotten. Produced in a variable edition of 20 they move from bright red to a darkened scarlet further emphasising the archaeological nature of reclaiming and revising these plans and bringing them into the light.

In many ways these were the types of prints that Mackenzie had expected to produce when she began the fellowship. But two synergistic events took her in new directions. One was a chance encounter with a collection of ghost stories that she stumbled upon while exploring the library, and the second was a trip to Japan. These two events led to two new bodies of work that both resonated with and extended her first group of prints.

In Japan she visited the Tadao Ando designed museum on the island of Naoshima. Her photographs of Ando’s building became the basis of her second body of work. In these translucent green images Ando’s characteristic dramatic lighting has become pure form. As with the first series, architecture is suggested rather than described. The vivid green of these prints comes from handmade inks that Mackenzie developed after researching the psychology of colour. In film, green is often used to signal the supernatural and has been used to similar evocative effect here, overlayed against Ando’s spare architecture.

Her final body of fellowship work, an artist book and folio of prints, explore the incredible story of Frederick Federici, the ghost of the Princess Theatre. Federici died on the Princess stage during the dramatic finale of a production of Gounod’s Faust in 1887 and he is said to still haunt the theatre today. Whereas her architectural prints are deliberately schematic, for her artist book Mackenzie has embraced narrative storytelling. Using a variety of etching techniques, including rich aquatints, dry point and photogravure, she vividly engages with the drama of the Federici myth. But the eerie play of light and the tender line, evident in the earlier work, are still at play here.

Although there had not been a straight through-line, Mackenzie believes there is a clear arc to her project.

“It was fantastic to be able to go on that big journey, through all of that material,” she says, “and see it transformed into this exploration of the sublime, supernatural experience of architectural space, trying to capture the sense of both the unfathomable and the embodied experience within a space”.

Like Mackenzie, Nicholas Hubicki began with a clear project in mind: he would create a set of staged images of hybrid plant life that would build on experiments he had already begun. He had a group of reference images such as those of the influential German photographer Karl Blossfeldt that he hoped to follow up through the library’s collection of prints and rare books. While he delivered on his original vision, Hubicki believes it is a much richer body of work because of several “creative detours” as he lost himself in the library collection.

One of the influential encounters was with eighteenth century English physician and botanist Robert John Thornton’s Temple of Flora. This extraordinary large folio book of hand-coloured etchings and engravings, illustrates thirty-one species of flowers from the common rose to rare tropical plants. It was created through a variety of print techniques and Thornton commissioned a number of artists to collaborate on the venture.

Although purporting to be a scientific work, the illustrations in Temple of Flora, sit between the imagined and the real. Some are literally imagined as Thornton and his team had never seen actual specimens. It is this peculiar location in a ‘nethersphere between art and science’ that Hubicki found compelling, and the work’s lush, romantic, almost hyper-real style, had a strong impact on the pieces he would produce.

Hubicki’s beautifully toned black and white photogravures are the result of multiple processes. They are each staged on a small physically constructed diorama. The backgrounds were assembled from earlier work shot all over the world, some backgrounds came courtesy of AI, some were digitally layered after the shoot, others hovered over the scene through digital projection. The final images were then digitally processed in various ways and then the sheet prints were often marked, torn or depreciated before being scanned again for the final transfer to the photogravure plate.

Through these multiple processes Hubicki creates deeply resonant images, hybrid beautiful monsters that speak to our apocalyptic times but also bring with them a vivid sense of history.

“I was interested in the series being atemporal,” he says, “not fixing it in the now, not saying it’s the future, not saying it’s the past, but it could be all three.”

For someone like Hubicki, who grew up in Melbourne, the State Library’s Swanston St building doesn’t just contain collections it contains memories. As he spent more time there, memories of childhood visits to what was then the natural history museum began to remind him that this is where he first fell in love with dioramas.

“I remembered the dioramas in the museum, I was fascinated by them as a kid,” he recalls. I’m still fascinated, and I think in terms of research, your memories of a certain place are also quite potent research material.”

In the paths Mackenzie and Hubicki traversed during their fellowships we can see the contours of what research-based printmaking entails. Many varied research processes became an intrinsic part of the ‘physics of print’ in these projects. It is research which is intuitive and serendipitous, based on books and documents, places and memories, people and conversations, connections and materials. It takes form in written texts, the structure and materiality of images, the alchemy of creating ink from pigment and laying it on paper or constructing sets and turning them into photography. It is not research that is dependent on this or any other exegetical text, it is research that is recorded in and expressed through the shimmering materiality of the prints themselves.

Printmaking is a process of transfer but that transfer from artist’s hand to matrix to paper is not linear. As Jennifer Roberts reminds us, the print emerges through a set of deferrals. In research-based printmaking we see that this printmaking transfer from artist to matrix to paper is not simply transfer, it is translation and transformation, it provides access not just to a single image but to a history of experiences, to a series of adjacent worlds.

– Marcus O’Donnell

Marcus O’Donnell is an artist, writer and academic. He is a member of the Baldessin Studio Committee of Management.

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[i] The Amor Residency has been supported by artist Rick Amor and The Tate Adams Artist Book Fellowship has been supported by writer and critic Morag Fraser AM

Reference

Roberts, J.L., 2024. Contact: Art and the Pull of Print. Princeton University Press.

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Sorcha Mackenzie: https://www.sorchamackenzie.com.au

Nicholas Hubicki: https://www.nhubicki.com