About the Film

I made this screenprint documentary film while filming for Northern Print’s Glossary exhibition in 2014, documenting the practice of printmaker Rachael Clewlow. Her work bridges data, journeys and striking visual composition, turning deeply personal, ordinary experience into a precise visual language.

Mapping a Life in Data

Rachael records her movements through the world constantly, from mundane errands to unexpected encounters, and folds them into a colour-coded mapping system that captures not just where she went but something of what the journey felt like.

I record my journeys everywhere I go. All the kind of can be from the banal to the interesting to the freak things that happen on a daily basis.

Nine Colours, Forty-Eight Hues

For Glossary, Rachael was working on a nine-colour screenprint that, through careful overlapping, would eventually contain as many as forty-eight distinct hues. Screenprinting gave her something painting never had, flat, crisp colour separations and layered transparencies that let each colour sit precisely against the next.

Basically, I use print as a way to experiment with things that I can’t do with painting. I haven’t found a way to overlay paint the way that I want to. I want it to lie flat against the surface and also use the transparencies.

A System With Room for the Unexpected

Rachael’s process is methodical, drawing on a background in recording and systems as much as in art. Mixing paint for screenprinting meant working in far larger volumes than her painting practice ever demanded, beginning with an off-white base layer beneath the whole composition, then nine further colours built precisely on top. The finished piece carries text listing the places she passed, grid references, dates, times and the exact colour combinations tied to each one.

This is a list of all places which I pass along this side. We have a grid reference point, so that’s according to the A to Z map of Newcastle. The date, the time, and the colour combination that stripes are going to be in.

The Artist’s Hand

Where digital printing gives perfect, repeatable results, Rachael prefers how screenprinting keeps the artist’s hand visible, small imperfections, handwritten text and slight shifts from one print to the next that bring a highly systematic practice back into the realm of touch.

With screen printing, you add in an element of the artist hand. I think the handwritten text kind of adds a little bit more of that artist hand feel to it.

That balance between planning and chance runs right through her practice. She never knows exactly how a finished print will look until it is done, and once the printing starts there is no adjusting the system partway through. As she put it while the print was still coming together, once printing begins it either works or it does not, and she does not really know what happens if it does not.

Filming Rachael Clewlow

Making a screenprint documentary film about a practice this precise meant filming close to the data and the decisions behind it as much as the finished print, the grid references pencilled onto paper, the test strips of colour, the moment a squeegee pulls ink evenly across the screen. Much of the film’s interest lies in that gap between planning and risk, watching someone who works from spreadsheets and grid references commit to a print she cannot fully predict once the first pull is made. That tension between control and chance is what made this such a rewarding screenprint documentary film to work on, and one of the more unusual print processes I filmed during the Glossary series.

Rachael’s work sits alongside other Glossary portraits from the same year, including Bridget Jones’s lino and solar plate practice and Tom Hammick’s monotype work, each finding a different balance between system and instinct.