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As part of the Dalziel Project, contemporary printmakers have been collaborating with researchers, exploring the archive in the British Museum (see more here). This has generated new work in dialogue with the Dalziels. Bethan Stevens recently wrote about this in Printmaking Today, focusing on the recent Dalziel-related work of Neil Bousfield, Louise Hayward, Chris Pig and Peter S. Smith: you can read the full piece on the Printmaking Today website, and here we take the opportunity to showcase the new work, alongside the archival images.
Neil Bousfield harnesses the narrative potential of the Dalziel Archive in his recent work What Hope For Holding Back The Sea (Ballot). Ballot responds to a large Dalziel seascape printed from several blocks which would have been engraved separately and then bolted together. Bousfield’s engraving depicts a place that is at once ‘local polling station and evacuation site’. It recalls the grid-lines of the Dalziel shipwreck but moreover makes us think afresh about the way grid systems work as tools of translation, mapping, transposition and impossible replication.
What Hope For Holding Back the Sea (Ballot) is touring nationally in the New Light Art Prize exhibition (2018-2019), where it was awarded the Printmakers Prize. It has also been exhibited in Bankside Gallery, London, as part of the National Original Print Exhibition (2017), and at the 21st National Open Art Exhibition (2017) at the Oxo Tower Wharf, London.
You can read a report of our artists’ workshop by Simon Brett in Multiples (May 2017), which details contributions by all the attendees: Hugo Chapman, Sheila O’Connell and Isabel Seligman (British Museum); George Mind (University of Sussex); and printmakers Alex Binnie, Simon Brett, Peter Lawrence, Keith Pettitt, Maggie Storm and Jazmin Velasco.