French printmaker Emmanuelle Orr has recently been thinking about her approach to printmaking, based on her reignited love of poetry. Having read a small mountain of poetic analysis and essays over the last year, she has been amazed by how little is left to chance in a (good) poem. She tells us; “Great poets use a variety of tools, from linguistics, to rhetoric or prosody, as well as intertextuality to create works where the form and the content of the poem respond to, complement or deliberately undermine each other: nothing in their work is ever accidental, and the Muse has little to do with it.”
This is something that Emmanuelle has been trying to take into her own creative practice. This has not meant that she has restarted writing poetry (“some things are best left in the past!”), but instead that she is aiming to make more conscious decisions over both the content of her work, and its formal structure. “I am trying to approach pieces not simply in terms of aesthetic quality (composition, colour choices…) or subject matter (what the print represents), but also how the medium of screenprinting can be applied (with its idiosyncrasies and rules) to effectively complement those decisions regarding meaning and pictoriality,” states the printmaker.
For example, in her most recent works Above the World and Aphinar, the intention is to focus on how light works in a landscape, and how it can almost obliterate it. Emmanuelle’s use of CMYK for these prints is not just a simple technical or aesthetic choice, but becomes part of the exploration of the impact of light and its relation to colour. In these works, the halftones are kept very visible so that the image completely decomposes into colourful dots, even from a distance. The print then becomes almost fractal: the landscape (the dune, the mountains) disappears into the light, and in turn the light diffracts into colour, as if seen through a prism.
In works like Elsewhere and Siren’s Song, Emmanuelle also implements CMYK printing (or sometimes CMY, as not all works in this series have a black layer) but in a slightly different way. Here, the image is not split into 3 or 4 channels, one for each of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow (and Black), but instead, a composite image is created based on 3 or 4 views of a same object, photographed through different angles or at different moment. These 3-4 images are used to create each of the layers and printed together to (re)compose one print. In these works, the eye seeks to reconstruct the image as it normally does with CMY(K) printing but fails: what looks like a normal 3-dimensional representation breaks down into separate images, each in turn appearing to be a trace of the others.
So far Emmanuelle’s exploration has focused on CMYK printing, albeit using different approaches for different prints. However, she intends to then continue this exploration with other tools in other series of works. She concludes; “While this does feel a little bit daunting, the idea is to open myself to a printmaking that is more deliberate, more intentional and that can only be a good thing!”
www.emmanuelleorr.com
@emmanuelle_orr
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