Panya Clark Espinal’s body of print-based project, Material Redistribution – Hamilton, plays with the blurring of boundaries between sculpture and image-making while investigating the power of material engagement to build connections with physical surroundings. For this project, recent experimentations using brick dust as a pigment for printmaking were expanded upon using bricks collected in local Hamilton historic sites (including The Cotton Factory, the site of the artwork’s production). A technical shift for this iteration of the project saw Clark Espinal and Smokestack’s analog printmaker, Laine Groeneweg, experiment with use of the prepared brick dust for silkscreen printing.
Old Hamilton Weave and New Hamilton Weave are two expansive works printed with these locally sourced brick-dust inks. Old Hamilton Weave – displaying more clay-saturated tones of deeper colouration – was printed with brick dust prepared from older bricks evincing a higher concentration of clay. By contrast, the lighter ink tonalities used for the printing of New Hamilton Weave were created from bricks likely fabricated more recently.
