Sarah Wright: Operation Inkjet

For anyone who’s studied at art school, the world is a wearying minefield of cultural signs and texts – cross them at your peril. Art made in delicate pastel pinks and yellows, for instance, is burdened by age-old associations with femininity. Few artists take on this baggage and instead play it safe.

One who hasn’t refused the candy is Karla Black, whose powdered paper and cellophane creations enveloped an already ornate palazzo like perfumed and gift-wrapped confections at the 2011 Venice Biennale. Returning from her visit to the show, printmaker Sarah Wright immediately bought five packs of pastel-hued paper, determined to lighten her work and get some colour into it.

The influence of Black’s palette is evident as I visit Wright in her home studio, where the floor is covered in A4 inkjet prints in pretty shades. Experiments with paper marbling, multiple variations of an upside down image of ballet dancers, and reproduced magazine images layered up with painted marks and then reprinted, cover the laminate floor. Incongruous among them squats a black plastic beast, the inkjet printer central to Wright’s process. 

“I work really directly with the printer, so I’ll sit on the floor, put the memory card in and go through the images, print them out, put them back through again,” she explains. “I just try and respond to them as they’re being made, rather than knowing what the finished piece will look like.”

Wright’s images are sourced from books and magazines, a fashion model’s head or women in paintings. She assembles these on the wall with other objects – found mirrors or ceramic tiles – in an arrangement she describes as a kind of visual poem, as in the work she recently showed in the Glue Factory exhibition Print Process. 

For her show at Glasgow Print Studio she’ll also use flat images and mirrors, again with the idea of making a visual vocabulary. She likens the elements to spoken words or vocal textures, rather than the left-to-right of a Western written language. Within the “rubbishy inkjet prints” are vestiges of time-honoured fine art techniques – a monoprint enlarged beyond recognition overlays the ballet dancers, for example.

“At art school I spent so long trying to paint and then afterwards realised that maybe the subject was painting, rather than the medium I used,” Wright explains. Other images have been made by painting directly onto the copier bed and printing copies of book jackets – images which look like they’re painted, but have never touched the paint. “I guess I’ve always reproduced painted marks, trying to undermine the unique painted mark,” she tells me.

We talk about influences and Wright shows me books on RH Quaytman and Wade Guyton, joking that she’s subconsciously just copying all Guyton’s work, even using his motifs in a cushion design at a workshop she took recently. Influence of interior design is also evident in Wright’s prints, perhaps underscoring a crossover of visual art printmaking with textile design in the city that seems increasingly prominent lately – designers and artists showing in the same spaces, such as the Print Process show.

Like Wright’s use of whatever images and motifs she encounters, perhaps her choice of palette is less a statement and more a reflection of these art-design crossovers. “I see a lot of pastel colours at the moment. I don’t know if it’s a conscious decision. These are considered feminine but I don’t know if that’s why I chose them.” The beauty of her process is, if the colour comes out wrong she can always print them again.