Linomation Dehisce

I was invited to take part in an exhibition called The Art of Lost Words. Each artist was given a "lost" word — one that has fallen out of common use, so few people still know its meaning. Mine was dehisce: to burst or split open. In anatomy it describes a wound or surgical incision reopening along its seam; in botany, it's what a seed pod does when it splits to release its seeds. We were free to respond in any medium. Having made two linocut animations previously, I went that route again — a process I've come to call Linomation. One of the things I like about working this way is how many outcomes a single body of work can produce: The linocuts can be scanned and animated. The prints can be displayed and editioned, either as a complete set or as individual pieces. The prints themselves can be animated into a Linomation. The scans can be collected into one artwork showing every frame in a single image. For the exhibition I showed a selection of frames alongside the Linomations. Each piece consists of 296 frames, so every stage of the process was intricate and time-consuming. I printed on large sheets of paper, several frames at a time, which meant deciding how to cut them down. Given the scale, I settled on a Polaroid-style border — wider at the bottom than the top. Two days with a scalpel, measuring and cutting each one precisely. Before printing, I scanned every linocut frame and spent days aligning them in Photoshop, since no two scans sat in exactly the same position. With hindsight, I'd have devised a better scanning system from the start. Once the prints were made, I had to do the whole alignment process again with those. I had a lot of fun with this project and have plenty of ideas for another — I just haven't got round to it yet. Ideally, the next one would be a collaboration.