Tadhg Caffrey is an Irish print-based artist and researcher. Currently living in London, his work is primarily grounded in photography and screen printing. Tadhg’s practice explores the processes of print, the use of repetition, and the mechanical nature of printmaking, and how these processes are linked to city life.
In 2016 the printmaker curated a small exhibition of prints from the UCL Slade archive of printmaking, highlighting a collection of 19th Century prints by Eduardo Paolozzi that depict the unique tone of city life. These works inspired Tadhg to investigate the technology that underpins and maintains modern cities through the ever-changing technology of printmaking.
Using photography of urban spaces, and digital tools to dismantle these spaces, Tadhg rebuilds urban environments through print, temporarily taking on the role of architect and urban planner. The slow, iterative medium of screen printing has allowed him to consciously change prints as they develop, by making decisions as pieces emerge, changing plans, and staying open to the flexibility that print represents.
Embracing this meditative print process, Tadhg’s work invites one to notice the city, how it changes, and who has the power to create that change. He has worked on series relating to city infrastructure, including how electricity pylons, petrol stations, and tower cranes connect humans to urban environments. This work has focused on drawing out the significance of infrastructure in city spaces by making them stark and obvious.
A recurring theme in Tadhg’s work is the tracing of capitalism in cities. He uses printmaking to challenge what geographer Nigel Thrift identifies as the “extreme everydayness” of infrastructure that constitutes “the bedrock of modern capitalism”. His works focus on disappearing businesses in London’s high streets, as well as gentrification, building a personal record of power and capital in the city.
Tadhg’s Tracing Textures series breaks down the textures of the seemingly smooth concrete in the Barbican Estate in London in order to highlight the minor details and the usually unseen craftsmanship of building labourers. The prints were meticulously planned and layered to draw out the different details of seemingly flat and uninteresting concrete. Tadhg has also worked with the materials of the city itself, printing brutalist architecture onto handmade concrete canvases. His Gdansk Shipyard and Solidarność series uses printmaking processes to explore issues of trade unionism and labour in Poland. The project places the tools of the workers and their environment into contrast, using abstract hand-cut stencils to capture a sense of how practical labour and passionate idealism combines and interacts.
Tadhg’s work represents an ongoing speculative body of research on how the layering, repetition, texture, and mechanics of print can elevate the everyday and unseen elements of urban life, and question our relationship with the city.
www.tcaff.weebly.com
@tcaff.prints
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