A long conversation with a printmaker who has spent thirty years not exhibiting.
She has made nearly four thousand prints. She has shown perhaps fifty. The work, she says, was never for the room. We spent an afternoon at her workbench.
The workshop is on the upper floor of a converted barn, in a part of the West Country that has, by the printmaker's own account, mostly been left alone by the recent decades. The downstairs is occupied by a small ceramics studio belonging to her partner, with whom she shares the building. Her own workshop is, by comparison, sparer: a flat-bed press of the kind made in small numbers by a specialist firm in the Midlands, a rack of inks, a long flat plan-chest, and — along three of the four walls — a set of metal cabinets containing, she tells me, nearly four thousand finished prints, arranged chronologically.
The prints have, almost without exception, never been shown publicly. She has had — by her own count, made on the back of an envelope as we talk — perhaps eight small exhibitions in her working life, totalling perhaps fifty prints. The remaining work has stayed in the cabinets. She is, by her own account, perfectly happy with this arrangement.
The conversation, lightly edited
Vero: You have made nearly four thousand prints. You have shown perhaps fifty. The obvious question first — why?
Printmaker: The obvious answer is that the work was never made for the exhibition. I have not made prints because I wanted to put them on walls. I have made prints because making prints is what I do.
V: That sounds, on a first reading, almost like a refusal of the contemporary art economy.
P: It is. Mildly. I would not, however, frame it that way. I would frame it as a different relationship to the practice. The exhibition is one possible end-point for a body of work. It is not, despite what one might infer from contemporary art writing, the only one. The cabinet is also a possible end-point. The cabinet is, for most of my prints, the end-point I have chosen.
V: Did you ever expect to show more?
P: When I was younger, yes. I trained, in the late 1990s, on the assumption that I would have a conventional career. I had a small commercial gallery interested in my work for a period of about two years. The relationship ended, on reasonably good terms, in 2003. After that, I did not actively look for another gallery. The lack of one suited me better than I had expected.
"The cabinet is also a possible end-point. The exhibition is one possible end-point. For most of my prints, the cabinet has been the end-point I have chosen."
V: What changes, when you are making work that you do not expect to exhibit?
P: Many things. The most obvious is the pace. I make, on average, perhaps three prints a week. Some weeks more, some weeks fewer. I have not, in thirty years, ever felt the pressure of a deadline. The work is finished when I have decided that it is finished. There is no opening to prepare for. There is no catalogue to write. There is no client expecting delivery.
The second change is the scale. I have, by accumulation, made a substantial body of work. The number of prints is, in itself, the result of having worked at a steady pace for a long time without exhibiting most of what I made. An artist who shows everything they make is, in practice, limited in how much they can make by how much the market can absorb. The market would not absorb four thousand prints from me. The market does not need to.
The third change is the relationship to my own work. The print that goes into the cabinet, knowing it is not for the wall, is a different kind of object from the print that is made for the wall. It is more for me. It is more, in a sense, an experiment than a statement. The cabinet permits experiments that the exhibition would not.
V: How do you support yourself, if you are not selling the prints?
P: The same way most artists who are not selling their work support themselves. A combination of part-time teaching, occasional commissions, my partner's income, and a very modest standard of living. We do not, by any reasonable measure, live well. We live, however, well enough to keep working. That has been the priority for a long time.
V: Have you ever thought of exhibiting the cabinet itself? The entire archive?
P: I have thought about it. I am not, at the moment, planning it. The cabinet, exhibited, would be a different object from the cabinet as it currently exists. The cabinet as it exists is a working archive. The cabinet, in an exhibition, would be a presented artefact. The transformation would change what the cabinet is.
I am also, I should say, not entirely sure that the cabinet would be improved by being seen. The cabinet has accumulated over thirty years of work that has been made without an audience. Some of that work might, on inspection, embarrass me. Some of it might surprise me. Most of it, I suspect, would seem, on review, fairly modest. I am not certain that the modest work would benefit from being shown.
V: What would you say to a younger artist who was considering this kind of practice?
P: I would say two things. The first is that it is possible. The art-writing economy frames the conventional career as the only one available, and it is not. There are other ways of working. The cabinet is one of them. There are others.
The second thing I would say is that the choice is not, in practice, made once. It is made repeatedly. Every year, every show I do not have, every gallery I do not approach, is a renewal of the decision. The artist who wants to work this way needs to be prepared to make the decision continuously. It does not get easier with practice.
What I left thinking
I left the workshop with a small envelope of three prints that she had given me, on the condition that I not show them to anyone. They are sitting, as I write this, in a folder in my own filing cabinet. I do not, at the moment, know what I will do with them. I do, however, know that I will think about them — and about the four thousand others in her cabinet — for some time.
The contemporary art-writing economy has, by its own internal logic, very little space for artists who do not exhibit. They do not, in the standard form, generate the events that the writing covers. They do not, by their own choice, supply the visible material on which the writing depends. The argument I have been making to myself, since leaving her workshop, is that this is a gap in the writing that I would like to find a way to fill. I do not yet know how.