Helen Cammock, Ingrid Pollard and Camara Taylor
Soft Impressions
This major cross-generational exhibition will span both gallery spaces and includes new and existing print work from the early 2000s to present day. Soft Impressions focuses on the artists’ shared engagement with and strategic use of the medium of printmaking, contextualised alongside works in installation, moving image, textiles and a painted mural.
The exhibition draws its title from printmaking, where each work pulled from a printing plate is called an impression - the same term can be used to denote the application of pressure in creating prints. Soft Impressions engages with printmaking’s role in the historic distribution of ideas about race and depictions of otherness, and its use as a tool for both political activism and propaganda.
Collectively, the three artists reclaim printmaking - their integration of its possibilities into their practice is loaded with gestures, omissions, and images made opaque. The impressions made – in print, on paper – have a softness which is equally powerful. In Camara Taylor’s digital print Untitled (familiar document), an image of family members in the home is printed with the black ink removed from the toner cartridge. In Ingrid Pollard’s There Was Much Interruption, the repeat pattern of the wallpaper is no longer a decorative device, instead providing a kind of visual camouflage for those depicted, drawn from photographs taken by the artist in Sacy, Lancashire and Ghana.
In Pollard’s suite of blind embossings, Seventeen of Sixty-Eight, which were made without ink – historic racist insignia collected from pubs across the UK is impressed into white paper. The audience is drawn into close range of the work to decipher the image, the shock of the imagery made even more forceful.
New work produced in DCA Print Studio by Helen Cammock includes a new suite of works responding to the life and work of Scottish mill worker and activist Mary Brooksbank. A second body of work replicates in a montage the details and effects of various historical print media of portraits of African-American abolitionist and orator Frederick Douglass, who gave speeches in Dundee and neighbouring towns in the 1840s, advocating against the Free Church of Scotland’s investment in the plantations of the Americas.
A common theme in each artist’s work is an exploration of identity and rethinking historical narratives or figures through poetic actions. A number of works across the exhibition are underpinned by sustained research in archives and collections, for example Helen Cammock’s engagement with the unpublished writing of Brooksbank, found in the University of Dundee’s archives, and Camara Taylor’s ongoing research into the life and work of African-American artist Robert S Duncanson, who spent time in Scotland in the 1870s during the Anti-abolitionist movement painting a number of his most well-known works.
New commissions in print have been created during 2024 production residencies in DCA Print Studio by Helen Cammock and Ingrid Pollard and will be displayed across the galleries.
Supported by
Soft Impressions: Exhibition Notes
Audio resources
To listen to our Exhibition Notes, please click here.
You can also access the audio exhibition notes on Bloomberg Connects.
