Tadhg Caffrey | Printing the Port of Barcelona

In his recent residency at La Maldita Estampa, Tadhg Caffrey produced pints based on the lesser seen parts of Barcelona. While the cruise terminal and famous Port Vell caters well for tourists (cruise tourist numbers have increased from 115,000 in 1990 to 2.7 million in 2017), the commercial and industrial port of Barcelona is usually a hidden space, unvisited by tourists and locals alike. Despite this, the port is of paramount important to the Catalan and Spanish economy, and is home to a huge amount of industrial beauty.

Largely ignoring the usual tourist sites of Barcelona, Tadhg explored the industrial port over two weeks via bicycle, boat, and clambering up various parts of the nearby Montjuïc mountains. Reflecting on his collected photographs from these trips, he chose scenes highlighting the variety of activity in the port. Tadhg uses print to combine these scenes with the pop colours of the Catalan flag, the diamond shapes echoing the spatial city planning of Barcelona. He printed each colour and scene one at a time, allowing unique perspectives and prints to gradually emerge on the paper.

The colours and details draw the viewer closer to the port, while acknowledging the difficulty of any attempt to capture the full sense of a large and usually separated environment. In translating these scenes to print, Tadhg has developed a language to collect the glimpses of the hidden world of the port. The series is expansive: hundreds of combinations of scenes and colours possible, mimicking the imaginative possibility of these industrial scenes.

Tadhg Caffrey is a printmaker primarily focused on urban landscape, infrastructure, and construction. He has developed print series on the Gdansk Shipyard, tower cranes, gentrification, and construction material.

www.tcaff.weebly.com
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