UNIQUE

VERA BOELE-KEIMER - OLIVIA KRIMPAS - WHITNEY McVEIGH

18th - 23rd February 2014

Intrinsic to the idea of a print is the act of repetition, and, through repetition, uniformity. But what happens when that process is disrupted? What happens when there is no repetition but only one act of printing, one impression? What happens when the image is hand-printed rather than run through a press, allowing human error to interrupt or interfere with a given structure or order?

This exhibition presents three artists who have manipulated or played with traditional processes to create printed works that are in fact unique. The particular methods which each artist has personally developed result in works that, though recognisable as part of wider body of work, nevertheless retain a basic individuality. In doing so, they ask us to reconsider the notion of uniqueness within printed work and explore the tension between the potential of the print to replicate and the innate individuality of the hand-made.

The human imprint, literal and metaphysical, is central to Whitney McVeigh’s practice. The artist’s intuitive ways of working include scratching, kneading, and rubbing into paper in a tactile and intimate process that creates works imbued with time, memory and the artist’s own physicality. Her monotypes are manifestations of printing or pressing actions, of lines drawn onto or into inked surfaces, and her half-figurative half-abstract work, most notably her monumental “heads”, speak down the ages to a universal self and collective human spirit. 

Vera Boele-Keimer’s practice is an ongoing investigation of surface, texture, space and shape. Her thoughtful and reflective works reveal the richness within the humdrum, the humble; the overlooked and the undervalued. In her woodblock prints, the artist has used a set number of grids, codified with colours, to create countless patterns from simple rotations. The works celebrate the complexity and beauty that may arise from the simplest of actions and combinations.