14.05.25 - 07.06.25

STEMS by One Three Collective

STEMS features work by artists Alison Kennedy, Andrew Gunnell, Belinda Reid, David McBurney and Mark Dustin. This inaugural exhibition of One Three Collective presents an experimental framework where individual artists are invited to contribute, and then interpret, a pool of shared source imagery. Working with print-informed methods to disassemble and reassemble this information, the project explores the finitude and collective location of images in a shared visual world.

Experimental print project One Three Collective operates with the simple provocation that working collaboratively opens new perspectives. This approach, inviting chance and surprise, is implicit in the project title where one doesn’t always lead to two—but rather, with collaboration, might sometimes leap to three.

The project is an open, creative opportunity rather than a closed collection of participants. Primarily an experimental print project, the Collective depends on a group of two or more artists agreeing to collaborate, and the members of the group can vary as the project is iteratively engaged. For instance, the Collective’s pilot outcome included just two artists, but this current iteration involves five printmakers, all collaborating to create STEMS.

To maintain coherence the project runs to a set of guidelines:

Gather two or more artists critically engaged with printmaking.
Choose a word prompt to serve as a conceptual starting point.
Invite each participating artist to source and contribute one high-resolution image from the internet in response to the word prompt.
Each artist works with at least two of the collected images and creates an individual outcome from each.
Outcomes that originate from a shared source image are exhibited together.

On a practical level, this framework offers opportunity to create fresh outcomes without continually needing to invent new scenarios. On a conceptual level, inviting multiple artists to collaborate on shared source material offers a method to explore perspectives on one of print’s functional roles: the movement of image information from place to place, from person to person, and from time to time.

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For any artist experienced with printerly image reproduction, this project acknowledges a shared enjoyment, frustration, appreciation, and required control of technical production. Yet beyond the shared technical foundation of 'how' prints are made, this project also explores the fundamental question of 'what’ is made through the process of printing. This starting position respects traditions and conventions of artistic printmaking but then goes on to speculate about emergent meanings that arise when individual printmakers create work from identical source material.

In doing so the Collective project considers printmaking (and printmakers) in relation to a world where content-sharing and image reproduction have evolved significantly in recent years.

To be more specific, it was only 2009 when artist Hito Steyerl described the value and contemporary ‘reality’ of ‘the poor image’.[i] At the time Steyerl was observing a pervasive visual language of noticeable degradation—incurred when images were reproduced for sharing across digital devices and the internet. Today, sharing images is unlikely to result in aberration.

In the time since Steyerl's writing, light-speed reproduction of digitally liberated, high-resolution image information has become ubiquitous. Accompanying this, the technology of everyday display devices has improved to the point where the delivery of images, at typical viewing distances, no longer reveals the pixelated trace of reproductive processes. In contrast with Steyerl's visibly ‘poor image’, and as a result of intervening developments, it could be argued that the current 'reality' of image reproduction is now characteristically invisible.

This progression toward invisible process extends to print production—evident in how even domestic desktop-printers can now rival photographic seamlessness. However, unlike the mass online migration towards invisibility, the material processes of printmaking often remain necessarily visible and characteristic. For example, the mechanically required and visible dots of silkscreening invite noticeably different encounters compared to the barely perceptible dots of an inkjet. And the tangible surface of prints may also reveal an architecture of production—as is the case with intaglio prints which, in addition to delivering an image, are often impressed with a narrative of process.

Given this context, the initial project prompt (to create prints from a common source) invites deeper consideration. The Collective’s experimental approach to printmaking offers a chance to explore not only the resulting artwork, but also the functional transfer of contemporary images.