Vigil (2022)
Screen-print, powered Rookwood soil and sealer on Rookwood concrete block
Life has a brevity in terms of years and memories of the deceased. Ceremony can revive past lives. Vigil memorialises Louisa Lawson (1848-1920), Rookwood resident, writer, publisher, suffragist and feminist. Vigil materialises as an analogue 3D screen-print using Rookwood soil as dry-media to allude to Louisa’s strengths and dark side. Echoing the saying “dust to dust”, the print is always threatened by the weather and animal or human activity. Vigil is ceremoniously (performatively) re-enacted by regular reprinting, rain or shine, live or via video, as a dedication to a life almost completely overshadowed by her son Henry’s literary work.
About the Artist
Alan Tulloch lives on Jagera Country, in Ipswich Queensland. Since completing undergraduate studies in 1999, Alan has created site/time specific ephemeral work for outdoor exhibitions such as Strand Ephemera 2003, Canberra Domain 2004, art+arch infinite 2004, Portside Public Art’s Portaplay 2007, Peel Island Residency 2010, print2print in Noosa 2019, and Tiny Gems in Port Adelaide Enfield 2020. Since 2015, he has been developing a method of screen-printing using (oftmetaphorical) dry media such as powdered charcoal, paperbark, soil, coal, sand and instant coffee where the prints have an ephemerality, affected by the weather and human or animal activity.
Transcription
My name is Alan Tulloch. I'm an artist from Queensland and I am contributing Vigil to HIDDEN Rookwood for 2022. Noting the significance of the life of Louisa Lawson, who lived in Sydney in the second half of the nineteenth century and early into the twentieth. She was a lady who did many things. She was a mother, a writer, a publisher, a feminist, inventor, suffragist and also the mother of Henry Lawson.
In Vigil, the artwork won't stand out like a big sculpture. In fact it's a screen print and the screen print is a montage of different images that have things from the life of Louisa and the work is perhaps a bit different as a screen print in that when I screen print, I don't screen print with inks. I use dry media and so a breeze, rain, a bird landing on it will cause the image to break down over a period of time. But with that being said, the print can last a number of days in good conditions. But as part of the Vigil artwork. I'll be holding Vigil. I'll be looking after the print and reprinting it as often as it needs.
Sometimes if there's rain, I might get out my umbrella and hold over it and just stand there holding Vigil. The artworks, the art media to suit the work. In the case of the printing of Vigil, I'm using Rookwood soils. With doing the screen that I use is hand painted and what I do is I paint the balance out of the images in such a way that the way in which I'm doing Vigil in the sculpture competition, as it will be, is that I'm making it 3D. So I've got my image that sits flat on top of a plinth, but what I do is I raise the height slightly, do another print, raise it slightly, do another print, and what I create in the end is an analogue 3D printer working almost the same to balancing of the print. Louisa often wore black dresses and she features in the artwork and what I've done is I've broken up large area of black which can seem just too heavy with the dry media print, and the way I've done that is I've used decorative lines that I found on a memorandum card that Louisa printed with her press.
The decorative lines would have been probably just set blocks that you purchased and but what I've done is so it's quite nice. The importance of women, especially perhaps by put and perhaps in the future, rather than just representing one person. Maybe there's a bit of scope when you look at it in this first printed form. There's all these intricacies and maybe the breeze blows and something starts to change. I hope that perhaps people could think of the expression of dust to dust and we're here for a bit of time and in Vigil, there's a beauty in the print and perhaps people may be able to appreciate that they can be beauty in mere dust.