Using the work that I have been doing towards my woodcut designs and developing a simplistic design similar to the styles seen in Indian paintings and Japanese wood block print, I have developed a design for my screen print. The design is a woman with her face covered; in Indian culture and also a variety of different religions such as Hinduism, Islam and Sikhism, all prevalent religions in Indian culture, modesty is very important. For this reason I have drawn the woman with her head covered with a scarf. However during my travels I have met lots of women who choose to oppose these traditions and therefore I have chosen to make the woman in my design have a deliberate gaze with the viewer, this is confronting and challenging, the complete opposite of modesty. I have chosen to work big for this piece of work, as this is also the opposite of modesty. If something is small, it is intricate and hidden, and forces the viewer to look closely. If something is big, it forces the viewer to look, whether they want to or not. This is similar to the attitude and purpose of someone who is fighting against culture and traditions. These women are inspiring to me, as they aim to be who they are rather than who society wants them to be.
After cutting out the stencil for my screen print, I started printing. I chose a large scale A0 to do my print. The large scale and screen is powerful and forces to viewer to look. I chose to print them in a bright red colour, also due to this as the colour red in big and bold and powerful. Red also has links to Indian culture as it is a colour used in marriage ceremonies, in the clothing, its in spices and colours of paint used for festivals.
The printing process itself was very difficult. I had made the stencil so big that I could not reach the other side of the screen and had to ask for the technicians help. I had also neglected to leave an area for the excess ink to sit, which meant there was not a lot of room to move the ink around the screen. Due to the size of the screen and the stencil beneath the screen, the edges of my screen print also didn’t show up and left untidy marks on the sides of the print. This is due to the screen being taught at the edges and the ink will not penetrate through the screen to the paper below. In future print, I am going to look into using a smaller stencil and rather than doing one large scale print using smaller screen prints in layers to build up a larger image. I am also going to alter my image to possibly include text. I think that there is links that I can see in my work to the way that the media exploits women and this is something I want to investigate further. This could be through text and use of image. I also want to try to use different colours with this piece, as I want to see what the different colours effect the work.
Overall I do like the natural marks and traces of the process of printing, that were left behind in these prints that I have made. This is something that I want to develop and take forward. It has been suggested to me to look at the work of Christopher Wool, who uses screen printing in his own practice. He uses text and image and it is also possible to see the layers and join marks of the screens as evidence of the process.
