Biography

Mary Modeen, artist/academic, lectures in Fine Art and is Course Director for the MFA in Art & Humanities in Dundee. Her research has several threads: perception as a cognitive and interpretive process, and place-based research, which connects many of these concerns, with attention to cultural values, history and embodied experience. As such, this research is usually interdisciplinary. Part of this work appears as creative art, usually printmaking, and part as writing and presentations. She addresses aspects of seeing that go beyond the visible, questioning what we know as sentient humans. Cultural values and individual differences are inherent in these investigations. 

Illustrated Talk

‘Printmaking Process as a Journey of Becoming’
This presentation by Mary Modeen will focus on the actual practices involved in making various types of prints, the matrices and the proofing, the development and construction of a printed image, as aligned to philosophical models of ‘becoming’. She will illustrate this with prints and photographs of working processes, looking at stage proofs, editorial revisions and visual re-thinking. Phenomenological and aesthetic considerations of this staged series of steps, Modeen suggests, links to many philosophers, and would include as well as the ‘becoming’, the ‘always already’, and the opening out of Barthesian suggestions of the work of the viewer as well. Through print examples, correlations to Derrida’s notions of différance as a visual distinction will be considered, especially as a link to the visual as a mode of becoming, privileging sensory modes of knowledge in embodied experience. The artist’s own work as a constructed mode of visualization demonstrates how the merging of the physical and the metaphysical find visible form. What this way of thinking about prints will suggest is a more fluid concept of printmaking as evidence of ‘the thinking hand’, offering material scope for further meditations as well as for reflections that may also be read backwards, through the steps of the creative process as visible ‘becoming’.