digital surface

Paul Coldwell in conversation with Jane Dixon

in her studio in Hackney, London,

2/12/08

Paul Coldwell        Let me start from my original idea of wanting to speak with you with regards to this Digital Surface project which was because you didn’t use digital technology as a significant element in your prints, you certainly don’t use it as a means of presenting the final works and I felt you might be able to provide some insights into why you have steered
away from this technology.

Jane Dixon     I often use digital photography as an inspirational tool, and a lot of preparatory work is done looking at digital imagery and layering it with my own, but apart from the series Regeneration, I haven’t used it in any major way up to now.

PC     This leads on to the question, why? Do you feel there is something lacking for you in this technology?

JD.     I think perhaps it’s too flat in terms of the physical surface and also too instant. All my work is very slow, and there is something about the duration of making it that is really important to me. While there’s something exciting about an image happening instantly, it doesn’t have the right resonance for me.  Also in the Regeneration prints it was important for me that
there was a play between the organic etched mark which bit into the more uniform digitally generated mark.  The combination of analogue and digital is exciting to me.  Etching has an inherent physical ‘lost and found’ quality in the relief surface of the plate and I wanted to employ that against the purely visual appearance of depth that came from the digital manipulated image.

PC     That’s interesting because for many people, it’s the speed of this technology that is such a positive attribute. To be able to print for example, a large format, full colour print instantaneously is seen as a great advance over previous technologies. But I think you are saying that you need a more gradual resolution and actually you want to stay in the work as its being
made.

JD     Yes, making is an important aspect of work for me, not only in printmaking. Each series that I make is constructed differently and the processes and materials are as much a part of the subject matter as is the image.  I think it’s a more sculptural approach rather than an image simply put onto a surface, the integration is crucial and so using a process where
the image is almost mechanically laid on top of a ground just doesn’t do it for me. Or at least it hasn’t up till now which is not to exclude it from the future if it seems appropriate. This latest Regeneration series is the first time that I literally incorporated my digital manipulation of the source photographs into the final prints.

PC     In the Regeneration series one wouldn’t immediately guess that they were etchings, the print is printed within the plate, no embossed plate-mark, a hard cut edge, no deckle.

JD     That’s true. On the whole I don’t really like the sense of the window, certainly not for these prints so it felt right to print to the edge. But with the Camouflage series, where the image is purely drawn, it did seem to work and so I kept the border.

PC     Printing to the edge as in the Regeneration prints seems to give these prints more a sense of objectivity as if they are facts….

JD     …like evidence.

PC     But also in terms of imagery like X rays, carrying the connotations of photographs rather than prints.

JD        It’s the ephemeral quality of photographs that’s important to me …. really it’s the negatives that I like, or x rays or medical scans. Its not necessarily to do with the imagery, its their sensibility, their transparency, their tonal range, the fact that the colours can seem very artificial, the way they transform a solid object into a translucent shadow.  It’s also this
relationship between the real and the artificial, that I find important, photography is very artificial even though it’s meant to be an accurate record.  There’s always that dichotomy between accepted fact and potential fiction.

PC     It could argued that the idea of photographic truth went out the window years ago, but the negative still caries with it a sense of truth, evidence and of course is very vulnerable and delicate which I imagine appeals to you.

JD     Yes, I realize that of course fraudulent ‘facts’ existed in photography long before Photoshop made them easy to produce but there’s still a prevailing notion that photography is an accurate witness in the way that a drawn image isn’t, in judicial courts a photograph will still be accepted as evidence whereas a hand produced image won’t be.  But you are right that the very vulnerability of the negative, its transformable ghostly nature, is very appealing to me.

PC     Returning to the series of tanks, Camouflage Suite, I was interested to know that they were drawn although you used photographic sources. They’ve been mediated through drawing but referencing the kind of effects that you can get through various filters and the flattening of space that occurs in photographs.

JD     Photographic sources resonate with me because they refer to something real, but photographs are also a filter between the object and me. I’ve never wanted to sit down and draw the object.  The flattening of the space is interesting too, the way that the real spatial relationships between objects can appear to be altered in photographs by the use of coloured filters,
that’s an idea I’ve used directly in the construction of some of my series, the Armour and Warplane paintings for example.

PC     Well one thing a photograph does is flatten, it arranges information across a surface, side by side,

JD     And it’s the artificiality of that which I’m interested in. It’s often only an idea I want from the object anyway

PC     It also occurs to me that it is the loss of information that interests you, both in the photographic source and what you subsequently do to it; you seem to like the ghosts of things.

JD     I like things that are transformable, a photograph is transformable, not fixed like an object.  I like things that have a provisional nature.  Take a photograph of something and it’s already changed and so when I work from that I can take it somewhere else.  I edit a lot. Somehow editing a photograph seems a natural process.

PC    When you say editing, are you doing that through drawing?

JD    Yes. I often take slides of photographs and project them and make almost maps, drawings, full scale which begin to separate out the parts I’m interested in. It’s like printmaking where individual plates contain different information waiting to be assembled in a variable order. I trained as a printmaker both at undergraduate and postgraduate level and this constructional way of working informs the work I do now, whether in print or other media.  It’s a mental process of deconstructing the image which I think comes naturally and is why I was drawn to printmaking originally rather than this being a methodology that I’ve learnt.

PC     I can understand this. Printmakers often share this interest in process. Process is also a way of thinking, a way of providing a space, a filter between the idea and the execution.

JD     That filtering process is the way I construct all my work, paintings, drawings and prints. It’s the way I think and photography helps that.

PC     Now it interests me in the way you don’t use the digital. In many ways the canon for the digital print has been to aim for greater photographic fidelity, sharpness, greater resolution. Your work is off in the opposite direction; you seem interested in the degraded image, to leave the minimum of clues. Now leading on from that I am interested in the way you use analogue photography….

JD    Well, the photographs might be less sharp but resolution and precision are qualities that I re-create in the work, again maybe it’s about transforming something.  As far as the analogue photography goes, I just take film to any print shop, I don’t look at the photographs particularly; it’s the negatives that interest me. And you don’t get negatives with digital photographs.

PC     There’s something wonderfully perverse about your thinking.  Artists have strategies that can seem very convoluted…. is it about finding ways of staying engaged in the work?

JD     I think it’s a lot to do with thinking time. Its time to make changes, its an organic process….creative for me….not a strategy that I have to invent to stay engaged.  The process seems perverse but the thinking is very clear.

PC     Each stage of your work results in a commitment to action, which you then have to follow through. If you were working digitally, you could make dramatic changes without any physical commitment but I feel this wouldn’t work for you?

JD     For me it must have a physical element otherwise I can’t tell if it works or not, because the physical is embedded in the idea, so the test is always to see if it works on a full-scale physical level. To see something on a little computer screen wouldn’t tell me anything really, or not what I feel I need to know.

PC     So you need it actual size and physical?

JD    That’s right.

PC    Can we talk about working with Kip Gresham on these prints.

JD     I didn’t make prints much after leaving the RCA, except briefly in Rome and on another scholarship and so it wasn’t until Kip approached me in 2003 that I started again after about a ten year gap. I possibly wouldn’t have made any prints unless Kip had approached me.

PC     And do you value that dialogue between artist and printer, or do you see the printer as one who merely carries out your wishes?

JD     No it’s much more than that, but on the other hand I am an artist who has been trained in making prints and that knowledge of process is important. So the relationship with Kip is more collaborative, he is doing all the printing but I am there for every stage to make decisions and adjustments as the work develops.

PC     It’s interesting this difference between artists who are aware of the processes but work with a printer because they can just do it so much better, as apposed to the artist who is unfamiliar with printmaking and keeps it all at arms length

JD     For me its one of the few times that I collaborate and I really value it and I particularly enjoy the discussion.

PC     Thank you very much.

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Biography:

Jane Dixon was born in 1963.  As an artist whose work uses a conceptual alignment of construction and image, she has since the early 1990¹s been developing a complex body of hybrid works incorporating painting, print, photography and drawing which principally explore the nature of vulnerability and impermanence. Her work has been acquired for the British Museum, V&A, Arts Council of England Collection, and for Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery following inclusion of the Camouflage Suite for the British section of the 26th Biennial of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana in 2005.  Solo exhibitions have included Kettle¹s Yard, Cambridge in 2000 as Kettle¹s Yard Artist Fellow 2000/2001, and at Yokohama Portside Gallery, Tokyo Gallery + BTAP, Japan in 2004 and 2008. She was shortlisted for the Jerwood Painting Prize in 1999
and received the Rome Scholarship in Printmaking at the British School at Rome in 1989.
Further details can be found at:
www.janedixon.net