Denise Hawrysio’s printmaking practice provided the initial impetus for the prioritisation of site-specificity and social relationships that characterises much of her work. Rather than viewing the medium through the lens of outmoded technique, she utilises printmaking as a situational tool to engage directly with the world outside the studio. As curator Bill Jeffries observes, “Much of her work has an aleatory quality manifested by a panoply of collective forces she employs as tools of her trade, including mechanical, human and geological phenomena. She seems to conceive of the printmaking plate as both a mini-landscape and a stage for cultural production”.

Expanding on these collective forces, Ian Wallace notes that Hawrysio’s decision to continue with imagery saturated in “imprint” and “touch” is strengthened by her entanglement with critical conceptualism, both as an aesthetic attitude and as politics. By employing a variety of interactive processes to generate imagery and content, she overcomes the potential “recherché” appearance of printmaking and capitalises on the possibilities of gesture. However, these engagements with the world also function as a distancing mechanism; she largely takes her own “hand” out of the arena of touch, substituting other personal or mechanical input so that “engagement is beset by indifference”.

Reflecting the fundamentally transdisciplinary nature of her practice, many projects expand from a specific medium into the physical environment; consequently, Denise’s print work is also to be found within both the Installation and Artist Books categories of this website.