Verbal Expression Part 1: lips and zips baby
Having covered tactile sensory dysfunction in my Polyester Makes Me Panic series of prints, it’s now time to tackle verbal expression.
If you go along to any ASD community group, the first question the parent beside you is likely to ask is: ‘is your child verbal?’ not ‘do you have a boy or a girl?” Gender or sex seems flimsy when compared with the faculty of speech. For context, here is a link to an excerpt of my short play entitled ‘Speak’, based on my lived experience of parenting a nonverbal child. I will add that our personal story had a very happy ending.
Anyway, I digress. Next up on the printmaking agenda is to make prints that capture verbal expression and indeed repression. The mouth seemed like the most appropriate motif. I spent a good bit of time on Pinterest doing searches like ‘mouth’, ‘verbal’, ‘silent’, and ‘mute’ and concluded that zips within the lips would allow me to communicate certain elements of verbal expression which I’ll write about in my next post. I didn’t trace over the lips accurately because it’s only a test. So here’s where I started:
Making collagraph plates is a 3-day process:
- Make the plate by wood gluing various materials (leatherette from very naff pair of trousers I no longer wear and zip from my neglected sewing box) onto your board/cardboard making sure everything is secure. Dry for 24 hours
- When dry, varnish with French polish/shellac. Dry for 24 hours. This ensures the plate doesn’t dissolve when ink is added. Rookie mistake #1, I’d forgotten that collagraph works best when the plate is the actual shape of the image and not mounted so I should have cut out the mouth once the plate was dry from the wood and could have saved myself some expensive shellac on the mount that was binned.
- When dry, it’s. ready to ink. I’ve used AKUA water-based intaglio ink because the oil-based ones are a nuisance to clean off your hands.
Results, Mistakes and Learnings:
- Rookie mistake #2. It had been so long since I’d made any prints that I completely forgot that the image comes out in reverse, doh! So the zip now closes from right to left which isn’t really appropriate for the English language
- The zip pull was too chunky to go through my very basic press so hence the remainder of the ink on the right-hand side of output 1 didn’t come through. I bought a cheap A3 size press for testing but guess it can only do so much so I was forced to hand press with a baren so outputs (2 and 3) are not as clear as I’d have liked.
- Newsprint definitely works better than calico but will try again on college press.
- I didn’t cut the material in one clean cut and ended up gluing on the side of the mouth with an extra piece of material which makes the mouth look deformed. The material needs to be a complete cut so will trace on material next time with tailor’s chalk.
- Not sure if the leatherette is a good fit to replicate the texture of lips.
- I want these lips to be red in the final version but black is ok for testing.
To be continued….