mike fell

The latest East London Printmakers exhibition (“The FishWick Papers”) kicked off last Thursday at Forman’s Smokehouse Gallery and runs throughout September. Here is the piece which I submitted (a smoked woodcut print called “Preservation”):

The gallery is great — a really large, modern space which shows off all of the work to its best advantage. And as always, I was super-impressed by the quality of the work on display and it is constantly inspiring to see how different members of ELP respond to the challenges of their chosen printmaking method and subject matter. 

The exhibition was one of Time Out’s five recommended First Thursday events and (perhaps naturally) I would also strongly suggest a trip out east. 

The next East London Printmakers exhibition is at Forman’s Smokehouse Gallery in Hackney Wick (details here). I decided to try out smoking my prints (in the “smokehouse” rather than the “cigarette” sense…). Here are some photos of the process.

I used wood I cut from the plate to create the smoke:

I used our Cobb BBQ to generate the heat:

A tarpaulin keeps the smoke in, along with the plate from the print for the previous ELP exhibition:

Smoke:

So, was it worth the effort? The ink did darken a bit, and the prints certainly have a nice aroma, but next time I’d experiment with different paper and possibly with dampening the paper in advance of smoking to try to hold onto more of the smoke. But check out the exhibition to see for yourself!

I mentioned in a couple of posts below that I had recently become aware of the Beanery cafe and the Whirled Art Cinema, both in Loughborough Junction. I now go along to both pretty often; the Beanery to get out of the flat when I’m working at home, the cinema to catch up on films which I missed in the Ritzy (or which themselves missed the Ritzy). Both are excellent and highly recommended. The cinema especially — it’s great to sit watching interesting film with the occasional train rumbling overhead and cool beer in my hand (and in the knowledge that I can be home within five minutes of the end).

NB Try the pizza at the Beanery — highly recommended and very good value!

A woodcut of me playing the ukelele:

This is an interesting article about the potential for using Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) in maritime transport instead of (or alongside) traditional bunker fuel. The latter is a highly polluting low-grade, low-cost fuel which produces, among other things, high sulphur emissions. These emissions will be getting a much tighter cap from 2015, so a lot of work is being done into alternative fuels. 

This caught my eye because I heard this new cap being used recently as a good example of unintentional geoengineering. Sulphur emissions lead to higher concentrations of aerosols (particulate matter) in the atmosphere, which in turn reduces the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface. The drastic reduction in sulphur emissions from shipping will reduce this “dimming” effect (explained here), with a concomitant increase in surface temperature. I can’t remember what this anticipated increase was, but it was roughly equivalent to front-loading several decades of the predicted warming due to anthropogenic carbon emissions. 

The point was that as much as people may dislike the idea of geoengineering, it has been progressing on a massive (albeit unintended) scale for a long time and should be debated in this context.