Ruth Pelzer-Montada

    
Ruth Pelzer-Montada
Edinburgh College of Art, The University of Edinburgh
r.pelzer@ed.ac.uk
http://www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/edinburgh-college-art/school-of-art/staff/staff?person_id=174&cw_xml=profile.php


Biography

Ruth Pelzer-Montada, PhD, is an artist and lecturer in Visual Culture in the Art School at Edinburgh College of Art, The University of Edinburgh. She has participated in exhibitions in Scotland and abroad. Her solo print-installation Schnörkeleien was shown in the Talbot-Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, in 2007. Her essays on contemporary printmaking have appeared in national and international academic journals, IMPACT Conference Proceedings (2009 and 2013) and online. She has also written catalogue essays for artists, such as laser-cut specialist Jennie Smith and renowned paper artist Jacki Parry, as well as for Edinburgh Printmakers’ site-specific project at the historical house of Traquair in the Scottish Borders in 2012.

Illustrated Talk 1

Photo/Graphic
My title is a condensation of the informative 2009 IMPACT panel which was titled ‘Photographic/Graphic’. As is frequently acknowledged, digital processes have brought print and photography into an ever closer proximity than was already historically the case. This is notwithstanding the fact that both practices’ occupy largely different educational, institutional, exhibitionary and discursive spaces, including their attendant constituencies, affiliations and identities. For a local example, see the different galleries cum workshop facilities in both Edinburgh and Glasgow for print and photography respectively. Yet in the increasingly intermedial contemporary art context, ostensible and varied fusions of photography and print are a frequent, even pervasive feature of print practice, so much so that the two seem to be sandwiched together, as indicated in my title.
My paper aims to address some of the terms and conditions of this intermedial relationship as it pertains to print practice. Even if one agrees with W T J Mitchell’s (1994) important assertion that ‘all media are mixed media’, concrete intermedial practices, such as those between photography and print, demand closer inspection. I will examine three overlapping areas of photo/graphic interactions:

How is the ‘field’ of photography, namely photography’s documentary, social and political efficacy and presumed realism constructed? In which way does the use of or reference to print alter or reinforce photography’s realism or documentary force?

Is the ‘form’, that is the visual appearance, closely linked and sometimes identified with a particular medium, foregrounded? How does this imply the handling of technique/technology or craft of the respective media?

In which way may particular qualities or even ontological conditions that are associated with both media intermesh or collide in order to thematise a problematics of vision?

Illustrated Talk 2

Prints as Visual Narratives/Narratives of Print
This talk will focus on the site-specific project Reflective Histories curated by Edinburgh Printmakers in the summer of 2012 at the historical house of Traquair in the Scottish Borders. Traquair is the oldest inhabited private house in Scotland, associated with the Stuarts, and closely linked to the intricate and topical history of Scotland’s conflicted relationship with England. Seven Scottish artists (Calum Colvin, Helen Douglas, David Faithfull, Lesley Logue, Rachel MacLean, Nicola Murray, Duncan Robertson) were invited by EP to respond to the actual material spaces and objects in and around the house in its present form as a heritage site as well as their associated (hi)stories.

Drawing on narrative theory as recently applied to visual art, the paper will examine the artists’ responses in terms of their narrative construction of individual objects or spaces. The paper will draw out the artists’ material and sensuous reconstruction and critical examination of the intersections of personal and private, as well as public and political associations and references of an already ‘constructed’ site such as Traquair. The artists employed photography, site-specific installation, stamping with light-sensitive ink, textile printing and embroidery, sculptural casting, the format of the artist’s book, relief printing, 3d printing and commercially printed multiples. A further examination will therefore be the enactment and expansion of the idea and practice of print and printmaking or ‘the narratives of print’ as performed by such a project.

In addition to its specific focus, for conference attendees from outside Scotland and the UK, the paper will provide an insight into aspects of Scotland’s past and present history as told through visual culture and an expanded print practice.