Motion. Stillness.

Alethea Richter explores the language of digital screen-based media through the hand generated process of printmaking. The work simulates in print, the gravitational pull of screen-based technology upon our attention. Layers of colour and repetitive mark making build to create optical movement in ruptured pixel grid formats as the eye is led through cycles of change, moments of rest and unexpected redirection. 

Loops of process are utilised to disrupt a linear reading of time. There are no reference points of beginning or end and it is difficult to determine an order in which it was created. The printed work is the result of a responsive process that is open to chance and unexpected outcomes.

 Canopying the artist’s work is the desire to connect with the critical discourse on print regarding surface and materiality. Ruth Pelzer-Montada relates in The Attraction of Print: Notes on the Surface of the (Art) Print “…viewers press up close to the prints, their eyes roaming the surface, scrutinising its concatenations, delighting in its variegated fabric, puzzling as to its sensuous fusion.”¹   An intimate engagement with the viewer changes the positioning from looking at, to looking through and within. This act of slowing down, looking deeper and through into the printed surface structure, is a key concern of the artist. It is here the rich permanence of the printed surface is contrasted to the temporal impermanence of the screen-based image. The final outcomes seek to hold tension between visual order and disorder, presence and absence, and most strongly between motion and stillness.

1. Pelzer-Montada, Ruth. 2008. “The Attraction of Print: Notes on the Surface of the (Art) Print.” Art Journal Vol.67, No.2. pp. 74-91