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TACTILITY: The Quality of Being Discernible by Touch

“We touch things and grasp their essence before we are able to speak about them.”

Henri Focillon, In Praise of Hands, 1934

The production of an artefact or object, something tangible and tactile, is fundamental to my practice and my enjoyment of making. The tactile sensation of the materials I use – the paper, clay, textiles and paint - are essential to the making of a piece, in the same way that the haptic (the visual sense of that tactility) is essential to the viewing of or engaging with it. Barbara Hepworth was principally a sculptor of the Modernist movement. She often intended viewers to be able to physically interact with some of her larger sculptures – introducing differently tactile surfaces and encouraging movement around and even sometimes through her pieces. She was clear about her art engaging all the viewer’s senses, in the same way that she felt connected to the landscape which inspired and informed her work (Hepworth, 1971). This piece is one of several sited in the garden of her former home in St Ives, that are at once exposed to and work with the elements to create a multi-sensory experience for visitors. It is monumental in scale and although imposing in size and solidity, it is simultaneously playful in its enticement to peek through its ‘pierced forms’ and invites a kind of intimacy through the tactility and patina of its surface.

*Four-Square (Walk Through)*, Barbara Hepworth, 1966

I find this invitation to touch compelling and have tried to evoke it in my own 3D pieces, using contrasting materials like wood, plaster and fabric to satisfy what I think is a powerful urge to understand a thing through the sense of touch, as much as through its visual characteristics. Even in 2D work, there is scope for a sense of tactility – in the texture of the paper that forms the surface for a print and the depth of the emboss that the plate leaves, for example. Barbara Balfour, artist and Professor of Print Media in Toronto, writes that different kinds of print “... from those with aspects of incision, deep biting and low relief on one end, to the more smooth and planographic on the other, allow for a range of the haptic as well as visually perceptible phenomena.” (Balfour, 2018, p125).

detail from *Battlefield*, Käthe Kollwitz, 1907

I see this particularly in the work of Käthe Kollwitz - a printmaker, sculptor and propagandist whose subjects were war and poverty – particularly their impact on women and children. She produced a series of intaglio prints about the Peasant’s War in 17th century Germany in which she used successive processes and different materials, to create powerful and disturbing images. Looked at closely, it is possible to see the different textures of paper and fabric she pressed into soft ground to create depth and atmosphere in her prints; and ridged lines of ink can be perceived amongst the inky blackness of the aquatints, creating definition and focus. The power of her images still resonates today, even more so given the current conflict in Ukraine, their elegiac nature given even greater impact by the visible texture inherent in the materials and processes she used. Even where artworks are housed behind glass and impossible to touch, a sense of tactility can be evident – and this is increasingly important in the digital world, as our connection with others and with art becomes more frequently mediated through screens. Recent lockdowns and the lingering pandemic have increased the sense of disconnection and isolation from others, but a haptic or visual sense of touch can be conveyed even in the pixelated realm of video and film.

Back in the ‘real’ world, touch and tactility often influence the materials we use to make art – the way that they feel and how they respond to our touch and manipulation can be a significant factor in our decision making about materials. Art historian Henri Focillon wrote about the integral role that hands and our sense of touch play - not only in our capacity to create, but in our ability to understand the world around us, to gain knowledge (Focillon, 2018). The seemingly simple pleasures of touching and handling the materials I use in making art is also enhancing my understanding of them, increasing the knowledge that I possess and storing it simultaneously in the conscious and subconscious.

MATERIALITY: the quality or character of being material or composed of matter

“When materials become wilful actors and agents within artistic processes, entangling their audience in a web of connections”.

blurb for Materiality: Documents of Contemporary Art (2015)

Using materials that convey texture or look enticingly tactile, even when the work cannot be physically touched, is an important aspect of materiality. But materials can also convey other meanings, for example related to their value or historic use. The copper plates sometimes used in intaglio printmaking are more costly than other metals like zinc or steel but associate the work with the rich history of printmaking and its original purpose as a means of communicating ideas and knowledge through reproduction.

*Untitled 29/75* from the *Amalgam* series, Barbara Kasten, 1979

My interest in materiality is closely associated with tactility, which is why I find the photography of Barbara Kasten so remarkable. In late 20th century Light and Space movement coming out of the US West Coast, her use of materials is determinedly driven by her “fascination with light and its inevitable companion, shadow” (Kasten, 2005). She experimented with materials to find those that gave her the best outcome in terms of their interaction with light, in order to create abstract photographs and photograms. Perspex is one of her favourite materials – used in this image – because of its transparency combined with the possibility of reflection in its polished surface and the geometry of its edges. The constructs that Kasten creates are translated into a seemingly unrelated but in fact wholly dependent final image, through what she calls the ‘illusionist property of photography’ (Kasten, 2005) – because the materiality inherent in her processes is not evident in the finished work, but instead is the mechanism by which it is achieved. This kind of art piques my curiosity: ‘what am I looking at? How was it made?’ and it is something that I have really enjoyed in my photographic studies of light, using paper and acetate to create shadows and refractions that can be confounding or puzzling to the viewer.

*The Good Mother*, Louise Bourgeois, 2003

This is in contrast to the work of Louise Bourgeois, where the meaning of the materials she uses is the heart of her practice. Her use of textiles and stitching references her upbringing as the daughter of a seamstress and tapestry repairer; she uses old clothes and fabrics to examine emotional fragility and connection and to convey the effects of time and the changes it imposes upon us. The vintage fabrics and clothes Bourgeois used were often closely connected with her own past, but she also recognised in them the imprint of previous owners and their makers. For Bourgeois, her materials were psychologically as well as visually rich, evoking damage and repair within individuals and familial relationships. “Bourgeois’ recurrent allusions .... in her art, to notions of severing and suture – to separation, loss and abandonment – and conversely to recuperation, reparation and rehabilitation...” (Cooke, 2022, p22) spring from a childhood surrounded by fabric and the tools of its creation and repair; they also allude to the feminine – women’s traditional work of weaving, knitting, stitching and the soft, insubstantial fabric of women’s dresses and undergarments. I find the dichotomy in Bourgeois’ work fascinating: between familial love and familial obligation; between damage and repair; between delicate, reserved femininity and the visceral realities of the female body. In The Good Mother, Bourgeois conveys constraint and enforced immobility through the threads tying the female figure down, but she also evokes the threads that bind us to family - the fragile connections of love, memory and time.

TEMPORALITY: The condition of being bounded by time; the state of existing within, or having some relationship with, time

‘I sensed quite clearly the earth’s slow turning into the dark’

WG Sebald The Rings of Saturn (1998)

I work quite intuitively, learning new processes and following the different avenues they open up, but it has become increasingly clear to me that temporality is a thread which runs through my work. Much of my practice is about light and the way that it interacts with my pieces, whether that’s the bright sunlight that brings out the relief in a blind emboss or the way that light falls on the different planes of a folded painting. Obviously, we use light to measure time - the span of a day from sunrise to sunset, or the changing seasons evidencing our journey round the sun each year - and the quality of light at a particular time of day or in particular conditions is also something that features in my work. Photography has been described as stopping time, embalming it (Balzin, 1960, p8) by capturing moments, split-seconds which cannot be repeated. The subjects of my photography, which I use as the basis of light-based process like photo etching and cyanotypes, range from skeletal leaves and seed husks to patterns in rock and landscapes – embodying time either in the natural cycle of growth and decay or the vast geological timescales that create the landscape.

Tania Kovats’ practice is based around our connection with the natural world, particularly bodies of water. Her evaporating sculptures are steel bowls shaped to evoke specific oceans which were filled with salt water. As the water evaporated, salt crystals formed intricate patterns around the inside of the bowl. Evaporation was created as part of a global cultural festival that ran alongside the 2015 UN Climate Conference in Paris and can clearly be read as a commentary on the importance of our oceans to biodiversity and the continuation of life on earth – and its materiality is the mechanism for delivering that message. But it is also an examination of temporality – the changes that happen over time, the cycle of evaporation and precipitation that effects and is affected by the weather and, more and more, the planet’s warming. There is an inexorability to the passage of time, as there is to the natural cycle of life and death and to the rhythm of the tides.

still from *The Green Ray*, Tacita Dean, 2001

Tacita Dean is also concerned with temporality, light and landscape. Her films around elusive solar phenomena – the final ‘green ray’ of the setting sun in this image or her study of the 1999 eclipse in Cornwall – capture the passage of time and our perspective on our planet’s journey through space. There is a phenomenological sense to the films too, presenting to the viewer something of the sensory, as well as the emotional, experience of those moments; she juxtaposes for the viewer the intimate and the cosmic – a simultaneous sense of human and of planetary scales. I am interested in these sorts of tensions: every other second a person is born or dies – deeply profound moments for the individuals involved and yet so mundane as to be events which occur thousands of times in a single day; and our lives, full of the range of human experience and emotion, are fleeting, insect-brief and insignificant against the timescales of what Kovats calls the ’process of landscape’ (Fortnum, 2007, p124). Dean’s portraits of venerable old trees similarly contrast their longevity with the decades of human existence or the shorter lifespans of the creatures that make their homes there. They also explore the effects of the passage of time, the beauty in aging and perhaps also the fear of impending decrepitude and death.

In my own practice, I am conscious of time not only as a subject, but also as an element that is key to success and so must be closely measured. From the length of exposure to UV light to the seconds of immersion in acid to etch an aquatint into a plate, little parcels of closely marked time divide and delineate the printmaking process.

PRINTMAKING: the activity or occupation of making pictures or designs by printing them from specially prepared plates or blocks

“Prints provide a mirror, reflecting the artist’s engagement with technology, however simple or complex, to produce multiple images that enter culture and circulate…crossing boundaries, states and time”

Paul Coldwell, Printmaking: A Contemporary Perspective (2010)

Printmaking was developed as a technology for rapidly reproducing words and images – a time and labour saving means of communicating ideas and democratising knowledge. The history and traditions of printmaking are a large part of its appeal for me, including the equipment in print studios which has been used for decades and by hundreds of artists: it is the sense of being rooted within a tradition and community, just by virtue of having layered plate, ink and paper under the blankets of a press. While there are aspects of both haptic and materiality in printmaking, it also has within it considerations that are not aspects of other media. For example, the artist must translate the image in their mind’s eye into its own negative – reversed orientation with blacks and whites inverted – to create the plate, stone or block, which we call the matrix. Then the matrix itself translates the image as it transfers it to the print surface: different matrices will produce profoundly different effects, as they convey essential aspects of their own making to the final print. So woodcuts, intaglio prints, lithographs all have distinctive characteristics and the same image replicated across different printmaking methods will have different sensibilities. There’s an intellectual challenge in all this also – problem solving, planning, strategic management of time and equipment in a shared workspace. All of these might seem like constraints that get in the way of the creative drive, but I enjoy that aspect of the process too, particularly the happy accidents that are such a feature of printmaking.

Many artists leave these technical considerations and the physical activity of printmaking to master printers, with the collaboration being about the translation of the artist’s idea into the printmaker’s product, how to achieve the artist’s vision in a medium which comes with the advantages of reproduction, but also these constraints and challenges. Helen Frankenthaler was an innovative painter whose abstract expressionist works were a forerunner of colour field painting. She also worked extensively in print, in close collaboration over many years with highly skilled and knowledgeable master printers. Many maquettes and proofs were produced to hone the results and achieve the ‘born at once’ (Findlay, 2021, p9) quality that she sought. Barbara Balfour writes of printmaking:

“All of this inescapably physical activity tends to result in a surprisingly thin layer of ink on a sheet of pristine paper, often with no apparent signs of the labour involved. I have often likened this and other curious print processes that demand repeated effort to that of housework, in which success ultimately lies in the lack of evidence of any mess or work involved” (Balfour, 2018, p125).

Frankenthaler’s prints are perhaps an exemplar of this quality, but Barbara Kasten’s photography is also brought to mind – the hidden effort and materials that are shaped and positioned to capture the perfect image in a fraction of a second.

Frankenthaler’s desire to recreate the gestural, fluid, qualities of her paintings represented a considerable challenge in a medium where rigidity and resilience are key characteristics of plates that will be used multiple times to reproduce an image (though even metal plates experience wear, changing the image over time), but the prints that resulted from her collaborations do possess a painterly and fluid quality. As with Kasten’s photography, it is often difficult to perceive how Frankenthaler’s prints were made because so much work has gone into reducing or overriding some of the characteristics of the medium, such as the edges between the jig sawed woodblocks and the formal geometry of the traditional printing plate. But the medium is actually evident in the wood grain that appears on the finished prints – the visible trace of the matrix’s translation of idea into image.

Another feature of printmaking is the framing of the image provided by the matrix’ impression into the surface and the resulting border around the image. Vija Celmins plays with this feature – and the broader tradition of framing artworks in this way. Celmins, still working in New York at the age of 84, is known for her detailed drawings of seemingly infinite expanses of desert, sea or star fields. By reducing the relative size of her infinity-evoking images and increasing the border of blank space around them she simultaneously increases focus on the image, but also seems to provide a sense of site or place to a subject which if produced in a borderless image feels, intentionally, overwhelming and limitless. In Alliance, she takes this idea one step further by putting two very different images together – to contrast the different ideas of space and perspective that the images offer. I see this also as a reference to the way that prints sit at the edge of 2D and 3D – largely planar but with elements of relief resulting from what experimental printmaker Michael Rothernstein called the “the irreducible essence of printmaking...an embrace, one body pressed against the other” (Weisberg, 1986, p63).

Both Frankenthaler and Celmins have looked at the traditions and rules of printmaking and sought ways to experiment within and around them. For me this is part of printmaking’s particular pleasure: extended, complex processes with endless opportunities to tweak, finesse, forget, deliberately avoid; the slight sense of jeopardy that accompanies the potential prospect of happy accidents; where the success or otherwise of the work hangs in the balance until that final reveal.

PROCESS: a series of actions or steps taken to achieve a particular end.

“What the artist does from the beginning though to the end, every movement on or away from the canvas, clay, stone, paper or thing on which [they are] working”

Steven Tye Culbert quora.com (2019)

In taking up printmaking, Helen Frankenthaler talked of ‘the romance of a new medium’ (Art Institute Chicago, 2018) and this is also an important driver for me. Not that I tire of a process, particularly, more that I enjoy the challenge of learning new ways of making and the excitement of discovery. Clare Barclay has talked about the importance of process in her work. While there is often a conceptual genesis to her work it is ‘at the mercy of the intuitive process that tends to take over during the making of objects’ (Fortnum, 2007, p81). One of the things that I derive most pleasure from in my practice is the unexpected – being able to follow unanticipated avenues of discovery and learning from mistakes. Like Barclay, I enjoy the work of experimenting and learning about a particular process or medium, trying to establish what is possible and pushing at the boundaries - I think it taps into quite visceral human tendencies to want to understand how things work. Barclay also talks about the tactility of her work and the transformation of familiar materials and objects into something new via the ‘handmade eccentricities of personalised objects’ (Fortnum, 2007, p83) and seeks to understand the connection between making and thinking: for me, making demands physical acuity and muscle memory combined with the intellectual challenges of problem solving and articulation of why, for example, one piece works aesthetically and another does not.

Barclay is a printmaker as well as sculptor and takes a similar approach to both media in her making. As well as tactility, she is interested in transparency, layering and negative space – she likens the relationship between objects in space to the relationships between shapes on a page. So the intellectual aspects of her process correlate, though the physical method of making and the resulting outcomes are quite different.

*ESRD: View From Above*, Susan Morris, 2012

Some processes require care and precision which can be quite difficult for me, but I enjoy the challenge of bending my disorganised nature to a careful, deliberate activity. And it is possible to elevate process to a ritual or to the central focus of the art. In ERSD: View From Above, Susan Morris used motion capture technology to track her movements as she made one of a series of works which involved repeatedly approaching a wall mounted roll of paper and plucking a charcoal coated plumb line so that it left a mark, before retreating again. This visualisation communicates the effort and time involved in creating the plumb line work, but is also a beautiful, intriguing image in itself; it explores the process and turns it to its own work of art. This is known as process art – where the process is not hidden but is a prominent aspect of the work. It is the obverse of Frankenthaler’s efforts to achieve a sense of spontaneous generation in her work, it centres the effort and turns Balfour’s point about the hidden nature of the work involved in artistic practice on its head. But the rules or activities associated with a process can often provide the jumping off point for experimentation, for new possibilities, for discoveries and serendipities.

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