Wash Out was created from an audio wave of a screen printing screen being cleaned in the wash out room at Bicep Press.
Each screen has to be exhaustively cleaned after it’s used, before it can be set for a new print. I have found how manual, labour intensive and how human the screen printing process is, in the age of digital, factories, AI and ease, inspiring and fascinating since taking my studio room in a fine art printers.
This piece is part of the series Sounds of Printing, which also includes Repetition and Expose. This series was originally inspired by a conversation with Jonny and Charlotte from Bicep Press about how colours are layered up in the fine art screen printing process. I’ve always enjoyed finding the hidden beauty in ordinary processes, so I captured audio clips of different processes and the studio and created pieces with them.
The original audio clip for Wash Out is here:
This was then run through an FFT in a Processing sketch, and I captured a frame that I liked as an SVG, which then formed the basis of the painting.
