by Andrew Mackenzie
Published by Edinburgh Printmaker's Workshop
A Short Statement
"Data and traffic networks are artificial creations, but nature has always contained a profusion of communication links, warm and cold currents, networks and translation centers. There is an order, after all, in the ongoing interplay among all the supposedly chaotic forms of movement in nature"
Peter Kemper, ECM Sleeves of Desire. Lars Muller Publishers. Switzerland 1996
"The very nature of a bridge dictates its symbolic use. It is a structure that joins two otherwise separate pieces of land, yet at the same time enhances their separateness"
Alby Stone, The Perilous Bridge. Originally published in At The Edge Magazine no. 1 1996
I am fascinated with the complex overlaps and relationships between our perceptions of nature and landscape. In my paintings I try to establish some kind of dialogue between actual places and invention, between man made and natural, realism and abstraction, surface and depth, external and internal.
Pedestrian footbridges, linking opposite sides of busy carriageways or railways on the outskirts of urban areas, are highly suggestive and often beautifully utilitarian structures. I am interested not only in the fact that the road or railway has severed a tract of land, making it necessary to cross a bridge to traverse this land by foot, but in the realities of the contemporary landscape, where the constant push and pull between romanticism and modernism is evident.
This particular bridge links the empty car park of a defunct supermarket, with the housing estate across the railway. I photographed it on a cold day in January this year, and used the images as starting points for detailed black gouache drawings on acetate.
I made 4 separate drawings for each print. These were exposed onto plates coated with photosensitive emulsion, each plate becoming a separate coloured layer in the final lithograph. The intense colour contrast is achieved by printing first an overall flat bright colour, then reserving areas of it in each subsequent layer. The registration of each layer had to be perfect.
The collaborative process of making these prints was interesting, challenging and rewarding, and it has caused me to rethink my normal processes and habits. I am much indebted to Alastair Clark for his time, input and technical expertise, without which I would have been lost.
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