Best Laid Plans
The idea for a fine art print to be included in the release of the album entitled Involuntary Villainy came with no restrictions. In a real exploration of what that could possibly mean, I thought long and hard about when I’ve played that role, the idea of who could be blameless, and who were the villains we might all agree on. Maybe it’s an exercise of power against the powerless, or a situation where two wills clash and there is a clear decided upper hand. I though of a character who was cast in a bad light, I thought of the children’s tales molded into the remakes from the antagonists point of view. But I was making images in 2024 and the rise of collage made by machines trained on stolen art work, and I thought about our copyright law, and the difference homage and inspiration, and what we currently call fair use. I thought of the Burns poem - To A Mouse. The Scots poem, written in November, 1785; wherein a farmer bemoans his role in destroying a mouse’s nest while working in the fields turns the idea over and over of who is in the role of the one who takes. The poem in question was probably* in the common knowledge of the father who had abandoned his musical career, and then what he passed onto his son who were making copies of their Astronomical notes. Imaginations design these as images, or the type of map which corresponds to the sky. These were tables of measurements, a list of numbers, disappointing to me, and maybe similarly to you you that instead of the exceptional images we can collect and droves of data available, copies of mathematical data representing what we see. There were a few artworks Sir John Hershel did copy with his cyanotype technique. One was a ship. Did that set the precedent for replication? I imagined the ship over an over, and wondered if that was image because of the requisite blue. I selected a remnant jacquard star cloth and crudely layer images of mice from engravings at the time and make endless (100) hand made copies from a digital collage of works I’ve never seen in person, with a filter shifting edges of the high pass filter slightly left, adding the texture of woven cloth like the pixels I was pushing.
The copies are great in a stack. There are 100 total, with a few more than 30 of each of the three designs.
*Though absolutely by a stretch of my overactive imagination!
Hand printed cyanotype of Ship, flat fabric stars, and the etching of a mouse. 11” x 15”
Best Laid Plans 1
Hand printed cyanotype of Ship, flat fabric Chewed up star strings with two mice and ghost ships 11” x 15”
Best Laid Plans 2
Hand printed cyanotype of Ship, flat fabric field with bottles mice, a flat flower, and the constellation Coma Berenices 11” x 15”
Best Laid Plans 3
Limited Edition of 100
Made for the release of an original album entitled Involuntary Villainy. The threee images are a triptych of digital collages featuring images of mice. The mice from Coma Bernices, and woven jacquard stars and digital sharpening scrims. The images are sourced from open collections out of copyright, and reconfigured into a narrative illustration. Conceived in reference to the first technology used in mass duplication, Sir John Hershel’s chemistry of Cyanotype, and made with inscriptions in the style of the first photo book creator, Anna Atkins. This print has an intentional crease in the divide between the text and image, meant to tuck into the album sleeve for safe keeping, or adding dimension of an object in a frame. To be displayed unfurled with the crease creating distance from the backing, but the folded up option is okay for a square image on display too.