Violent impressions - an investigation of slow violence through a printmaking and photography practice

Fahy, Niamh

Abstract

The human actions that create waste and initiate slow violence do not climax with the death and destruction of environment. Other-than-human life will continually and non-coherently assert agency over the future forms and adaptions of that waste (Hird and Yusoff, 2019). This extends to my own inquiry as a print artist, investigating how slow violence reverberates and proliferates across landscapes and bodies. Through creating narratives that challenge and make permeable the boundaries between landscape, human and non-human life, we can radically reimagine our relationships to other forms of life and reflect on the hierarchical structure that limits our imagination. Within this paper, I will present a series of hybrid print works situated in practice-based research that attempt to confront and weave the co-existing tensions and interdependence that overlap in a landscape inhabited by multiple histories, temporalities, voices and narratives. Through negotiating a combined methodology of fieldwork and studio practice I reflect on how the interruptive force of slow violence can be reimagined through the haptic nature of the printed surface, without repeating the imagery of landscape as a stratified stage or background that hosts the folly of human actors (Hird and Yusoff, 2019). The printed image emerges from the act of creating pressure, impressing, pushing and rubbing the matrix in order to reflect the details on the surface of the plate. Through attention to the indexical marks, traces and deep recesses within landscape we can become intimately engaged with the cyclical unfolding of a violence that extends from the human hand to the land we impress, slowly finding its way back to inhabit the very fascia of our bodies. This research aims to reconstruct violent narratives through a multidisciplinary print practice that attends to the microbial, imperceptible and disguised relations within landscape

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (unpublished)
• Conference Name: Violence: The fourth Biennial PARSE Research Conference
• Start Date: Nov 17, 2021
• End Date: Jan 19, 2022
• Deposit Date: Jan 25, 2022
• Publicly Available Date: Jan 26, 2022
• Keywords: Slow Violence, fieldwork, printmaking, photography
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/8542859
• Publisher URL: https://parsejournal.com/about/