Abstract

This research draws an analogy between our reliance on the computer, the digital, and religious belief systems, resulting in a set of prints that used a combination of digital drawing and printmaking to create comic iconoclastic re-renderings of religious iconography that question the veneration of objects that accompany intangible belief systems.
Taking as their influence contemporary cartoon and manga imagery, generic photographed imagery found on the internet (on sites such as ebay), semiotics and the stripped down graphic language of Pop, the research aimed to reconstruct these visual references creating a stylistic hybridity that echoes the collaged objects within the works and creates a stage for mis-readings, mis-understandings and paradoxes in the movement between the real and representations of the real, and also in the reading of these as images as either political comment, playful montage or bathetic pauses in a cartoon narrative.
The method involved the use of silkscreen printing to both blur and illuminate the boundaries between digital production and the hand produced, to question the role of these mediums as metaphors for the virtual and the real and creating a pictorial dialogue that echoes the symbiotic relationships within the imagery created.
One of the works was selected by a prestigious panel of printmakers including Chris Orr and Paul Coldwell for the exhibition ‘Bite’ at the Mall Galleries in London 2011, with the intention of ‘showcasing exciting new prints by artists working in a range of different printmaking methods’, exhibiting artists included Damien Hirst, Peter Blake, Gary Hume and digital artist Suzanne Moxhay.
Three works have also been selected for the 2012 International Print Triennial to be held in Bunkier Sztuki Contemporary Art Gallery, Krakow and then travelled to the Horst-Janssen Museum in Oldenburg, Vienna Künstlerhaus, Dalarnas Museum in Falun, and Mimar University in Istanbul.