bideford black: light on light

bideford black: 999 prints

bideford black: dot dot dash, drawing, drawing, drawing

Tones and drawing on studio wall

Drawing Bideford-inspired tones

Drawing Bideford-inspired tones

Out with the pencil and drawing tones, inspired by samples of shadows, blacks, glooms and darknesses gathered whilst snooping round the archives at the Burton Art Gallery & Museum. It's amazing the array of techniques that artists have developed through paint, print and pencil to show shadow and form.

bideford black: making an ink to print on a press

Grinding Bideford Black

Mixing a Bideford Black letterpress ink

A jar of Bideford Black letterpress ink

Weeks and weeks of grinding and mixing, regrinding and testing to get an ink made of Bideford Black that dries quickly, doesn't smudge or transfer, sits well on paper and hopefully is relatively light-fast… Time will tell.

bideford black: drawn thoughts

bideford black: of ink and tones

Tones gathered at Bideford Archive © Lizzie Ridout

Tones gathered at Burton Art Gallery & Museum © Lizzie Ridout

Start at the beginning…
Reading up on the wider cultural significance of black and particularly interested in black as ink. That's to say, the qualities of ink and how it's been used in history. Also as the sort of supporting hero in the bigger and hugely important story of the invention of the printing press. 

First stop, Bideford Archive to gather examples of blacks used as tones from old, local newspapers, followed by a similar process at the Burton Art Gallery & Museum, Bideford.

black list

Black is night skies, gloom, shadows, caves and dungeons; blackboards, witchcraft, chimneys, a punch-to-the-eye. It is negativity, formality, convention, sophistication and seduction. It is the printing press, pigment and photocopiers. It is earth, oil and dirt; life, death, mourning and melancholy. It is blackout curtains, a Claude glass and a camera obscura. It is darkness, the absence of light, all colours and yet no colours. It is a void, a deletion, a censorship, a secret, a mystery. It is the end. And it is the beginning.

time passes, things get done

It feels like ages since I posted anything up here. That's because it is. But contrary to how it may appear, things have been happening. The end of 2013 and the beginning of 2014 were mainly focussed on writing.  

Several peer-reviewed papers were published. I was particularly pleased with The Architecture of Conversation in Message: Mapping Eclecticism Through Practice (published 2013, by University of Plymouth Press) which was an epic to both write and design, as I tried to represent the temporal nature of the dialogue (various communications, events, emails and notes over an extended period) and the qualities inherent in conversation through a print-based version of an immersive text (if that's even possible). I'll get a pdf of it up on lizzie.ridout.com soon. A few pics above in the meantime - click to read.

A paper called Showing Saying: On Speech Balloons was also published in Semiotics & Visual Communication: Concepts & Practices (published 2014, Cambridge Scholarly Press).

More backwards gazing soon.

library of congress

Very nice to be here…

temple

Am very delighted to have been offered the opportunity to put one of my Welcome's here at Temple Contemporary at the Tyler School of Art, Philidelphia, USA. Historically it's always been really hard to find appropriate locations to exhibit this piece due to the health and safety issues of having something underfoot. Also, whilst it would be lovely to have this piece outside, it's just to fragile to handle anything other than sunshine. Temple Contemporary appears to have an internal space within an internal space - so this should be ideal. Exciting! Thanks to Robert Blackson, the director for getting in touch.

blighters

It's these little blighters that caused all the trouble: the spines and hinges. If you've never made a hardbound book before it will sound like madness to say that it took us two whole days to get this sussed out. But we're there. As I sit here, I'm surrounded by piles of half-wrapped folio board and stacks of 'u-flaps' drying. It's 11pm and I've put in a 14 hour day folding cloth over awkward corners and wiping glue up and down my arms to keep if off my copper folder and so my precious book cover.

We're getting somewhere but it could still be tight.

More soon.

so where was i? vol. ii

So this is the final version. This is what we have to make 60 of. A rather beautiful, but troubling (it gets marked easily) grey-green cloth with a grey-beige lining. Picks up all the captions on the prints and in the booklet really nicely.

so where was i? vol. i

So a little under 6 months ago, this was where I was at. Trying to work out the design of the portfolio that would contain all my prints and my booklet. The above pictures were taken of the mock up that Chris made. We shimmeyed around all over the place, trying other ideas. But I always returned to this one as the one I liked the most. So this is what we'll be spending the next two weeks trying to make 60 of - with much help from Anna, Chris, Bryn, Steph, Cheyenne, Tara, Tana and Lindsay. 

Different colours, but essentially the same format. We're just out of the trouble shooting phase now - and have finally made a near perfect final dummy.

The production line commences this week…

the return

So I'm not sure that I mentioned it but today I'm getting on a plane back to this wonderful place to finish what I did not last time. This is one of many reasons why I've been a bit quiet up here lately. It's taken quite a bit of work to get things up together ready for me to work at break neck (and obviously also impeccable) speed. Not to mention how hard it is to design a casing (for 50 sets of limited edition prints and a letterpressed pamphlet) just using email and skype. No touch allowed. Tough, really tough. And then there's my ineptitude at grasping the simple concept of grain direction… Poor Chris…

Thank you hugely to PLymouth University for investing in me once again.

solo iii

Some tasters…

solo

Have a solo show of the prints and texts for Ways to talk and yet say nothing or ways to not talk and yet say everything and the drawings and sculptures for The architecture of conversation. Had just a day to set it up but it looks ok (although it never would have happened without SB stepping in and saving the day. It's impossible to set up a show single handedly - lesson learned.)

You can find the work in the Scott Foyer, Plymouth University, Drake Circus, Plymouth.

From 27.03.12 - 26.04.12

That's the poster for it up there - I made it. But you can't really see it properly, so you may just have to come and see for yourself.

Do come!

absent but not idle vol.ii

 

Now with all the pages printed, I have to begin the laborious process of folding and stitching the pamphlet. A very kind technician at Plymouth University is constructing me a saddle to hang the folded pages over once they've been folded, so that I can stitch them more easily and neatly.

Two down, about one-hundred to go.