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Paul Stopforth is currently full time visiting faculty at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and an artist who draws on memories and fragmented visions of South Africa, where he grew up. It is his positioning within the diaspora that plays a vital role in his image-making processes.

When he stepped into the David Krut Workshop in late October 2006, at the beginning of a week-long visit to Johannesburg, he was about to embark on an etching project that would appropriately mimic some of the tensions of his own life. It is a project that reveals the influence of time and distance on visuality and the process of decision-making that goes into making artworks.

Due to time constraints, Stopforth worked with me on a single copper plate. He began by simply drawing into an acid-resistant ground on the surface of the plate and etching these linear marks. Subsequently aquatints were added in various stages. The plate was proofed using a variety of inks and papers during that week, however, he left having not completely resolved the image. I continued experimenting with dyed Chine Collé papers and inks in his absence, sending him photographs as the proofs rolled off the press.

It was almost three years later, in May 2009, that Stopforth returned to South Africa. Knowing he would have an opportunity to rework the image prior to his departure, he came up with an idea while discussing screenprinting with an American printer. Together they decided that through the medium of screenprinting we could achieve a sense of layering by introducing further imagery on top of the image of the Blanket Pins.

At the beginning of this second visit Stopforth presented us with an ink drawing of a tap, done on Acetate. This particular kind of tap is synonymous with South African sports fields and school playgrounds. His intention was to expose the drawing onto a screen for further proofing on top of the numerous etchings we had printed as tests.

Although I have experience in screenprinting, the David Krut Print Workshop lacks the necessary equipment for editioning in this medium. It was at about this time that we met Lingo Rodrigues who was learning the art of screenprinting in his Centurion studio. Lingo offered to proof and edition the final screenprinted layer once we had discussed what compositional options we had available to us. It was also necessary for the artist to see the results of this proofing so that a final decision could be made on the editions before Stopforth returned home to the US.

With so many people influencing the creation of this print it is hardly surprising that it exudes a feeling of unrest. The layering of the tap and its decorative background (on top of the Blanket Pins) deceives one’s perceptions of depth and the differentiation between the two shapes within one image.

What is noteworthy in the making of this print is the artist’s levels of intervention. In the drawing of the tap and the pins he is in complete control of the image. On other levels we see him deliberately losing control to haphazard mark-making: the drips of aquatint behind the pins were created in an uncontrolled manner.

Similarly, the tap is screenprinted as a final layer with no planned mode of contact. As a result some interesting effects occur where etching ink mingles with screen printing ink unexpectedly. It was interesting to observe how the image metamorphosed as a result of Stopforth spending so much time away from it. The drastic decisions that he made regarding the print could be attributed to his art-making endeavors between visits to South Africa.

In some instances artists are forced to suspend their influence on the processes that take place in a printmaking studio. In this particular case the artist had no choice but to let go – there’s not much one can do from a painting studio in Boston when your South African printers are working on your proofs.

Successful prints are often achieved when mistakes are treated as points of departure rather than irreversible acts.

In an e-mail exchange with me, the artist said the following of his prints:

While artist-in-residence on Robben Island in 1994 I became fascinated by a blanket pin on display in the prison that had been created by one of the political prisoners out of a found length of high tensile wire. As a fragment of time and place this humble, beautifully formed object seemed to contain so much of the history of both the Island and the mainland. Much of my work since the early seventies has made use of fragments of the South African environment to engage with questions of history and memory, and these fragments from ‘home’ continue to occupy me although I now live and work in the United States.

In the print I have repeated the image of the pin as an object that reflects and mirrors itself. It is perfectly self-contained. Both are suspended in a broken, textured field and the whole image is ‘held’ in place formally in the bottom left hand corner by a fragment of design from a Malian mud cloth.

For centuries blankets have kept the cold at bay in various parts of Southern Africa. Blanket pins are therefore an essential and functional device in the lives of many people. These prints celebrate that object and that fact.

As of September 2009, three variant editions have been printed, one of which has the tap imagery screenprinted to the edge of the paper margins. One of the editions is the etching by itself, and the third edition is still being experimented with. The tap has been screenprinted on top of monotypes, and as a print that stands alone. Due to the extent of proofing in this project, many of these “tests” will be sold as monotypes.

Keywords: david-krut-print-workshop, DKW, Etching, paul-stopforth, Printmaking, Screenprint, Screenprinting