Pencil Stories
- Situational Prints, SFU Gallery, Vancouver, 2007
- Situational Prints, Dundee Contemporary Arts, 2008
- Situational Prints, Open Studio, Toronto, 2009
- Situational Prints, Martha Street Studio, Winnipeg, 2010
Hawrysio produces her prints by employing external agents: human and physical (such as cars driving over etching plates). The prints are a collaboration between the artist and the world as she finds it; the actions and motions of Hawrysio’s surroundings leave their mark on her art, with the result that each print is a still, a frozen interface between the materials of art and the physicality of the world. — Bill Jeffries
Pencil Stories (Panel Saw)
Collection: Burnaby Art Gallery, SFU Gallery
A panel saw is a standard piece of machinery for any professional woodworking business. At Dobb’s Joinery in Herne Bay, on the Thames Estuary in Kent, England, I fixed an etching plate to the bed of their panel saw for a period of one month. The resulting marks became a record of their daily activity of cutting wood panels.
Pencil Stories (Mount Rundle)
Collection: Burnaby Art Gallery, SFU Gallery
Mount Rundle is one of the most recognisable mountains in the Canadian Rockies. Its steep limestone cliffs make it both alluring and difficult to climb, as the hiker has to scramble over tedious and treacherous loose scree – broken rock fragments covering the slopes under the cliffs. As I began my descent from the summit in the summer of 2006, I placed my etching plate on the scree; it slipped and slid down the limestone slope. I recovered the plate where it got wedged in the scree further down, placed it face down again, and let it slide, repeating the process until the plate and I finally reached the tree line.
Pencil Stories (Speed Bump)
Collection: SFU Gallery
Nearly every residential street in London has speed bumps installed for the purpose of ‘traffic calming.’ Traditionally known in the UK as ‘sleeping policemen,’ these costly and controversial devices do make many streets safer, but they can also increase noise pollution and cause wear and tear on vehicles. I placed the etching plate face down on the edge of one of my local speed bumps, where it was run over again and again, sometimes flying across the road, only to be picked up and placed again on the speed bump, for the duration of one day.
Pencil Stories (Goods Lift)
Collection: SFU Gallery
A Goods Lift, known in North America as a freight or service elevator, is a caged lifting device used commonly in schools, pubs, hospitals, retail shops, small business and restaurants. This etching plate was placed on the bottom of a goods lift operating between the kitchen and the serving area of a school. The marks on the plate are traces of all the movements in and out of this lift over the period of one month.
Pencil Stories (Bully)
The critical effect of these works, the confounding of our expectations, is based on the latent discrepancy, the almost absurdist relation, between image and text, between engagement and indifference. They are as much a joke about the historical conundrums of artistic technique, as they are about social emancipation or creativity and the unconscious. This complexity of intention and effect is the radical strength of the work. — Ian Wallace
Pencil Stories (Jeans Factory)
Hawrysio’s prints are remarkable for both their conceptual premise and their social engagement — and for the oddly appealing aesthetic that emerges from the process of their creation. They boost the fading fortunes of traditional etching and lithography into the postmodern present. — Robin Laurence
Exhibition catalogue from the solo print retrospective Situational Prints at SFU Gallery, with essays by curator Bill Jeffries and artist/writer Ian Wallace.
Download catalogue (PDF, 4.5 MB) · high resolution (12.7 MB)
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