I work with signs and symbols, and when turning to printmaking I am attracted to the reproduction of artwork by others (myself included). These works serve as a kind of revered raw material – subjected to my creative “abuse” as a means of arriving at some sort of new starting point – at the very least. At Centre SAGAMIE, I will be focusing on the industrialisation and the mediation of war (and empire) as my theme. The symbol I have selected to work with is Picasso’s Guernica.

My first engagement with this monumental work goes back 27 years, when I “imported” the piece by reproducing it to scale using a library photocopy machine. The result was a distorted version of Guernica comprised of 224 sheets of paper pinned to a wall and measuring some 3.45 m x 7.82 m. This was in lieu of traveling to Spain, which was an impossibility for me at the time. Today, I have a similar motivation: With Covid, and a reluctance to fly in the age of global warming, I wonder if I’ll ever see the original. But there’s more to it than that: history and daily news combined will always remind me that war is really never acceptable – full stop. If art, in some form or another might drive this point home, it is certainly worth the effort. I will travel to Centre SAGAMIE with my photocopied Guernica in tow, with the purpose of scanning all 224 pages, so as to transform the work once again, this time digitally – bringing it forward to the electronic age. It remains to be seen what new iterations are possible…