Su France | What is a Collagraph?

So, what is a collagraph print and how does nature-inspired printmaker Su France create her pebble prints? Su’s designs are not sliced up rocks (as once asked by a customer at a fair), but collographs created to celebrate elements of nature. Collagraph helps Su to accurately emulate natural textures and a quality of line or colour that other printmaking methods don’t allow in the same way.

Collagraphy is a printmaking technique where materials are glued onto mount board or another hard flat material such as wood. ‘Kolla’ comes from a Greek word meaning to glue or stick, and ‘graph’ links to the verb to write/draw/mark-make, thus when Su creates a print using the collagraph technique she is sticking materials to produce printed marks.

This technique is one she now frequently returns to, currently with an aim to show some of her precious beach pebbles. Su tells us; “It also takes me back to the simplicity of cut and stick, and like many printing reveals, you never know quite what you’ll get until that first pull from the print bed. My dad has a keen interest in geology. Studying more deeply during his retirement but having an avid interest in all things linked to tectonic plates and how particular rocks types were originally formed. Some of this geological interest has obviously rubbed off!”

When creating her prints Su firstly draws pebble shapes, some from her imagination and others from specimens which she surrounds herself with, and which link her to place and are evocative of “windy days in Scotland, with inky clouds threatening, or the huge skies found in Lincolnshire on days where seascapes fill our view”. At times, Su has also combined her collagraph prints with other designs such as intaglio printing directly from seaweed or dried hornwrack. She scrapes, cuts, and scratches into mountboard to create depth and interesting textures. Su comments; “It can be tough on your hands cutting out the pebble shapes, but its worth it!”

Next, she glues on interesting material, with low relief, to replicate the textures she notices on the stones; “Sedimentary stones, with their lovely stripy outfits provide great inspiration and I am also excited by stones with quartz lines”. Su spends time on the shore lining these up, finding different ways of linking the stones together in an organic way a very meditative process. She then sticks on materials such as card, textured ribbons, pencil shavings, string, dried botanicals, and even carborundum grit. These textured materials are then trapped under the surface of some aluminium foil. It’s at this point that Su runs it through her etching press for the first time as it compresses the materials together.

She then uses varnish to protect the collagraph plates, as she can then use the plates (the surface she is transferring the image from) multiple times when creating new compositions or inking up for the printing process. Safe wash inks are then employed, which can be washed off with soap and water, rather than the need for harmful chemicals so it is a non-toxic inking application and clean up. Ensuring the ink is firmly pressed into each crevice, crack and textured line is imperative so brushes and flexible material such as recycled labels are all utilised to push the ink in. Su then polishes some of the ink off and it is this that takes experience; “not too much or too little – Goldilocks would be impressed”.

The first reveal of the collograph print is the most exciting part of the process for Su. She states; “I am always impressed with the deep deboss that the rollers create, pressing into my dampened, non-bleached, environmentally friendly papers”.

One customer, at a recent fair, told Su that they thought the printed stones look like “they are enticing you to hold them, tumble their pebbly, textured shapes in your hand”, and Su couldn’t have wished for a better response!

www.sufrancedesigns.com
@sufrancedesigns

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