Displacement

Displacement.
Intaglio, Chine-Collé.
60cm x 90cm.
2016.

I finally finished printing an edition of three of the last print from my thesis exhibition. I worked on this edition over the course of the past three months. I built up the image by printing and layering about thirty (mostly small) printing plates. It's a bit of a crazy process, but when I started the piece, it was a rather experimental image, which made printing the edition a bit of a challenge. I printed one to two plates on each sheet of translucent gampi paper per day at the studio. The ink has to dry in between print cycles. Once finished, I mounted the gampi on a sheet of rag paper.
The imagery in this piece is part of my Dispossession series and depicts the displacement of subsistence farmers that are forced off their lands by the expansion of soy production, represented by the mechanical image element of a pneumatic soy seeder. Please note that some of the figures are carrying seed jars, symbolizing the ongoing effort to save seeds and the hope that more sustainable planting traditions might persist and be saved, even though they might lie dormant for a while.