Material Memory

Academic summary

The woodcut is one of the oldest printing technologies with a deep history. It is firmly rooted in early book publishing and is, as such, a medium of memory, sitting in the lacuna between the binaries of absence/presence, visibility/invisibility, material/immaterial, and surface/depth. Alongside its mirrored spaces, mediation and inherent “out of joint” time, as observed by Jennifer Roberts, these characteristics of the woodcut hint at an essential haunting at its heart.

This project, provisionally titled “Material Memory”, seeks to activate the woodcut’s spectral characteristics, to explore the personal hauntings of childhood, memory, and nostalgia. It assumes a synergistic relationship between print, specifically the woodcut, and the theory of hauntology; suggesting that printmaking can be enhanced by notions of spectrality and hauntology. A spectral approach to the practice of wood carving can expand the woodcut beyond merely the printed image. It can allow the spectre in the wood to speak, allow the printmaker to engage in alternative, ghostly epistemologies, and to reconsider the material manifestations of the woodcut. Print, as Frieder Nake said, is material memory, and what are ghosts, after all, if not materialised memory?

While this project is rooted in the traditional woodcut, it is trans-disciplinary and seeks to expand the woodcut beyond mere visuality. As such, the work is not constrained to image-based printmaking but embraces sound and experimental music as forms of expanded printmaking practice.