Thursday 20th of June

10am-1pm

Cultural & Museum Studies Catalyst

Room 237A, ARC Building

This in-person practical workshop will allow participants to explore Takuhon printing - one of the earliest non-western forms of printed mark-making or object-recording. Participants will be invited to bring a small, hard, three-dimensional object with them that is of interest to their own research, so that it may be used as their subject in this workshop.

Takuhon printing can be a helpful method for exploring the unseen materiality and performativity behind printing processes. As an alternative to Western forms of printing and documentation, this method can help to interrogate problematic colonial legacies, the authority of the printed document and its role in shaping ideologies. Alongside preparation and making processes in this workshop, participants will discuss key print concepts such as reversal, transferral, temporality, the seen and unseen, and memory.

Prints are often described as objects that sustain present traces of past actions. As such, this workshop will offer a hands-on, materially-engaged way to reconsider dialogues between past and present, seen and unseen, and to highlight how past actions may shape present representations – as well as to reflect upon what may remain hidden in museum exhibitions, archives and collection objects and their related stories and hierarchies of display. The print offers an alternative view of the original object, often revealing what was previously invisible; they tell stories that were once hidden. In this way, the print can be thought of as analogous to an object label in a museum, gallery, or collection.

Traditional museum labels are often considered a manifestation of the one-sided authority of an invisible and omniscient curatorial author, rendering visitors into passive receivers of a single fixed meaning. Yet, objects have different meanings depending on how they are displayed and who is looking at them. Museums thus increasingly centre polyvocality—the inclusion of multiple voices in displays—as part of wider strategies of inclusion. Labels are an important site for critical intervention in museum collections, particularly in the form of decolonisation. This workshop will encourage participants to consider the acts of selection and creativity that produce labels by writing labels for their finished prints. What stories can be told? What perspectives can be represented?

This session will:

• Introduce participants to Takuhon printmaking techniques and allow them to creatively engage with the materiality and performativity of printmaking
• Introduce participants to key issues surrounding object labelling, including questions of authority, representation, and access
• Invite participants to consider how they might uncover the ‘hidden stories’ in their own research topic
• Discuss how their doctoral research might intersect with ideas of materiality, temporality, and the interpretation of the historical past.

Takuhon printing will be led by Sandra De Rycker whose research (as a non-printmaker) at Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) Print Studio explores methods of print from a non-expert perspective. Sandra’s Doctoral Research  in partnership with DCA Print Studio is a Collaborative Doctoral Award from SGSAH, with the University of Edinburgh and University of St Andrews. Her research uses ethnographic and socio-semiotic perspectives to consider collaborative printmaking processes in relation to systems of representation and value within cultural production, highlighting the agency and significance of collaborative processes during print development.

Dr Jordan Kistler will lead the creative label writing. Jordan is a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Strathclyde. Her research focuses on the ways in which museum collections function as textual expressions that are ‘read’ by visitors, with a particular emphasis on the alternative readings brought to museums collections by diverse public audiences.

Click here to register

First published: 17 May 2023