Lily Fforde

I employ traditional and experimental printmaking practices as a means to explore the revelatory nature of printing. With a specific interest in relief processes such as linocut, etching, and collagraph which involve a plate and the possibility of multiplicity, I am interested in the relationship between matrix and print as one that can evoke both contact and absence. Thinking of printmaking as analogous to memory, my practice is one in which the ‘original’ is mirrored, repeated and altered to reveal new meanings. I wish to broaden these concepts into 3D space. The use of a continuous collagraph roller creates a pattern which holds the possibility of infinity, replicating itself yet abstracting the denim textile it is made from. In Charlotte Perkins-Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper, a Victorian woman fixates on the wallpaper of her room, ending the story dragging herself around it following a mark on the wall. Thinking through poetics and wordplay of the domestic and the feminine, the skirting board speaks to the edge (hem, skirt, fringe) of experience and what we might look like from there. Conceptually and materially I am interested in reconstitution, debris, what sinks to the bottom of bags and pockets and rooms; I make use of ready-to-hand materials and textiles and recirculate them in my work.