Rachel Gracey met me on a freezing January morning outside her home. She was keen to show the street where she has lived for the last twenty years. A site for her sustained looking, of things that might first appear unremarkable, but then begin to take on an intensity—a particular blue of a plastic bin or the way a grey wooden fence meets the orange of a brick wall. Gracey’s Oxford is not the elegant sandstone of its signature college buildings, but a resolutely suburban endeavour, made meaningful by time spent walking the pavement, alert to the minor changes of weather, the way overhead cables carve up the sky or when geometric shadows fall on the familiar framed facades of mid-century terraces.
After picking up a welcome hot coffee, we head out to her studio, purpose built towards the back of the garden. Here one encounters the George Mann & Co. Direct Lithograph Press, with its heavy cast iron base, standing in the middle of a carefully arranged space, with inks, sink and printing tools to one side and her drying hangers and plan chest on the other. The press was sourced from the University of Plymouth, where it had a previous life turning out the varsity newspaper. It feels significant that this dense object has carried with it the trace of industry, of labour and text, words and images, both the thinking of high-minded academics and equally, the local gossip. These days it delivers images of a very different order, the once regimented typography of a publishing ‘house style’ has given way to Gracey’s coloured street views and interiors, depictions that breathe with a silent, deliberate mark. The press is now in the service of a visual poet.
It isn’t only the title of a work like, Between the Lines at 5pm, that invites us to a closer reading. It’s the way every element of the picture seems to speak to the artist’s concern. The modernist building, with its reflective surfaces mirroring the sky’s turn from pale blue to yellow, signals the approaching dusk. Its generic clean lines are rendered with an equivalent economy that contrasts with the heavy shading of the more vernacular housing opposite. Between the differing architectural styles, stand the tops of streetlamps, providing the counter diagonal for a dramatic single point perspective. They already appear lit, so as not to be caught out by a retiring sun. Whether buildings or electrics, each structure directs our line of sight to a lightly sketched central treeline. There is something so familiar about this scene that one might fail to notice how Gracey has radically cropped the composition. It describes a street by its absence, and instead we are treated with an immense expanse of fading light that ensures we keep looking up.
I’ve always been fascinated by the discipline of print in the production of an artwork. The method seems to involve different kinds of techne: the knowledge of an ink’s consistency, its degree of translucency or opacity, the pressure applied to the plate, the tooth of the paper, its density and thickness. We spoke at some length about Gracey’s choice of the latter, her preference for Arche Platine, and how it is becoming harder to source. It might seem over technical to dwell on such details, but they deeply matter for the final, emergent image. It’s the kind of knowledge that takes years to acquire, the understanding of how grease registers on a re-grained plate, and how this makes lithography so sensitive to the touch, to an infinite number of marks, scratches, smudges, and brushes. This material knowing is absorbed through the daily practice of handling the paper, drawing on the plate, mixing and applying the inks, and through numerous tests and experiments, finding the precise hue to surprise or compliment the multiple existing layers that already make up the image.
For, the image in lithography is emphatically made, as much as it is developed through observation, composition, drawing, or painting. Making implies a constructing process, suggesting different stages of application, demanding any number of decisions that accumulate until the required result appears. Each time the press is released, and the plate is lifted from the paper, a working impression appears for the artist’s critical gaze. Gracey spoke of how difficult this process is, how to judge what is still needed, what additional move might bring resolution to the partially nascent work. In her most recent collection of prints, the making has involved pushing beyond layers of ink to almost a form of shallow relief. Gracey has introduced a process of overlaying leaves of cut card, that she describes as collage, yet verge on being model like in their physical presence. Just as with the print form, the model is also made/ built/ constructed. It also has connotations of experiment, of visual thinking, of ‘what if?’ It’s as if with these recent collage works, Gracey is asking her prints questions of framing and composition while stretching our perception of spatial depth.
The exhibition title, Placing Time, might refer to the artist’s desire to reflect on two decades spent in the same home, where friendships have formed and deepened, and children have grown. It might be speaking of memory, of attending to how one significant moment has followed another. The exhibition reveals time has been used to pause upon the smallest of things, the glimpse of a traffic light beside a silver birch tree, or how one side of a semi-detached provides the perfect ground for an evergreen fir in nocturnal snow. These glimpses take time to apprehend. The act of placing might also put us in mind of a working table, as an alternative, say, to an easel or wall; a flat surface for a master printer, rather than one that is sloping or upright, where unfinished works are laid out and collage fragments can find their place before finally being fixed.