The Intimate Printmaking of Poppy Jones

Marking the release of artist Poppy Jones’ eponymous first monograph, published by Zolo Press, Something Curated shares an exclusive excerpt from the new book. Spotlighting ninety works made over the past four years, the monograph is foregrounded by a conversation between Jones and Los Angeles-based artist Paul Sietsema—a segment of which can be read below.

Poppy Jones will be launched at London’s Tenderbooks on Wednesday 12 March from 6–8pm. And from 28–30 March, Herald St gallery will host a solo presentation of the artist’s work at Art Basel Hong Kong.

Poppy Jones came to her current work in the best possible way. After consciously producing experimental works, perhaps with a little too much artistic intention, she found herself sequestered at home during the COVID lockdown with a new child and began to casually document the goings on around her. Her self-trained mind and eye and the rigor of her engagement with printmaking and painting asserted themselves perhaps subconsciously, which naturally positioned the images she began to create within the framework of her earlier interests. The physical necessity of easy and accessible image capture and production imposed itself, and she found herself using the workflow of iPhone to the printer to the polyester plate to the small etching press. The need to involve her hand drove her to retouch and enhance the images with watercolors, naturally producing a subtle and highly immanent process.

The resultant imagistic mix is enigmatic and poetic and almost brutally formal, but also touchingly intimate. Not modernist, of course, but rather the milieu of fast social media-based image making gently tugged through the sieve of the cultural. With their humble scale, the individual works correlate with the space of the head and its confined perceptual apparatuses, but also with the space of the screen of a tablet, laptop, or phone. In these small forums, the fleeting strokes of the hand are either hitting keys, swiping, or laying down paints to enhance or correct an image depleted by its interaction with somewhat inappropriate substrates such as suede or silk. The force and heavy-handed assertiveness of “proper” painting are removed and replaced with a delicate tactile sensibility, a gentle assist to a current technology rather than an exaggerated and anachronistic expression of self.   

During our conversation, Poppy sent me links to Wenceslaus Holler’s printmaking work. The delicate strokes of the etchings and engravings this Czech-born, London transplant made in the 1640s were so fine that the prickly strands of the fur being depicted wore down quickly as the copperplates were printed. This subtle technological deficiency inadvertently added a structural softness that further melded Holler’s strokes with the delicate hand of the furs and fabrics he portrayed. Within prints often no larger than 3 by 4 inches, a realm of the proximal proliferates, one in which the rhyme of depicted material and method is both intimate and structural. The subject matter of these prints is described as suggesting the nearby presence of a fashionable woman who has discarded her luxurious accessories after coming inside from the Bohemian cold. The subject who had removed these items and placed them on a table is out of view, and perhaps importantly, out of mind, so that the objects and their sensual nature are enhanced and re-established as a primary experience for each viewer.

Paul Sietsema: What led you to the imagery you are working with now? 

Poppy Jones: Between 2010 and 2019 I worked with traditional printmaking tools and materials, making monotypes on paper that sampled fragments of textiles and art history. I had a baby in 2019, and the COVID lockdown began just after his first birthday. I had spent his first year trying to find ways I could make work and care for a small child. I had several needlepoint embroideries on the go, some based on Sonia Delaunay’s studies and inspired by the quilt she made for her baby son in 1911. I was also working for weeks on an embroidery of surrealist artist Eileen Agar’s face. Whilst thinking about the artistic lives of women throughout history, I found the process of making these textile pieces reassuring. I was also thinking more about fashion textiles and their ability to directly capture and connote a moment in time.

For a while, I wanted my work to be more directly autobiographical and was exploring ways to do this. I had a plain panel of a 1930s suede jacket that had fallen apart after I had worn it for years, and I framed it in aluminium. I was excited about the immediate presence of this tablet-like object, and I kept it in my studio to look at and consider its potential. 

In 2020, around the time of my son Jude’s first birthday, the lockdown began and we moved into my parents’ house nearby. My dad is a photographer, and their house is full of photography books. I read Sally Mann’s autobiography Hold Still. The way photography allowed her to make work whilst caring for her children inspired me; I realised that the long afternoons at home in the garden could be punctuated by artistic intent, which my baby would be unaware of and unaffected by. I started documenting the early morning domestic interiors with my camera phone.

Derek Jarman’s home in Dungeness is along the south coast of England, not far from where I live and work. In his memoir, Modern Nature (1991), Jarman is dying and speaks powerfully of the intensity of his experience of the natural world. Re-reading Modern Nature during the COVID pandemic, experiencing the intimate and physically immersive experience of early motherhood whilst communicating with friends virtually through fingerprint-smudged computer and phone screens highlighted the strange contradictions of everyday digital interactions. 

I was making images intuitively, drawing on art historical references in a very loose unconscious way. After making Tulips (2021), I could see its relationship to André Kertész’s Chez Mondrian (1926), a photograph of wooden tulips taken at Mondrian’s home, which my partner Joseph had introduced me to several years before. Surprised by the realism of the lo-fi printmaking process I was experimenting with, I made an image of my jacket on a panel of tan suede.

I’ve been thinking about a quote by artist Richard Hamilton: “Printmaking is a fascinating activity. Part of its attraction is that it can be done at all. In this cloning of an authentic, authoritative, individual yet repeatable mark, there is a kind of sorcery. It is a genetic mimicry that parallels organic creativity. Perhaps this unthinking ability of an image to give birth to itself persuaded Watteau to the habit of ‘counter-proofing’. Having made a drawing with sanguine crayon he could make a reflection of it, transferred simply by pressing it against another piece of paper. No doubt the artist craftsman of the 16th century who chased ceremonial armour and weapons for the nobility found it gratifying to process a shadow of their work by filing the exquisitely engraved lines with pigment to make an impression on paper from the metal drawing (July 1984).”

PS: You mention reading Jarman’s Modern Nature, in which he describes the intensity of his experience of the natural world. I’m assuming that the move to satisfy the way a camera and cinema itself process imagery led to a quite particular quality to Jarman’s perception and understanding of the world. You mentioned screens and using your phone’s camera. Is it a phone you take pictures with exclusively?

PJ: Yes. Part of the reason I make small works is that I am interested in how many of us spend so much time captivated by small images on our phones/tablets, etc., so it makes sense to me to use a phone in the process of making my artworks. The more I have taken photographs using my phone and taken them through this photography/lithography/watercolour painting process, the more I have come to understand the type of image that best works for my purposes, and I have a keener awareness of the transformative qualities of light.

PS: The Richard Hamilton quote above mentions prints made in the 16th century that were pressed directly from ink-coated hand-chased armor that were used to create a record of the craftsman’s delicate work. This is an important step in the evolution of printmaking and one which is echoed in the work you made that precedes the work you are doing now. You mentioned spreading ink onto textiles and printing from them directly by running them through a lithographic press, but also copying historical paintings by hand, printing these on the etching press and then tearing up these prints before the ink had dried and running them through the press again, now as a plate to make another image entirely. 

It seems you’ve developed a method of working that evolved from the more traditional printmaking processes you studied to one using polyester plate lithography. It’s a highly portable and accessible process that can be put into a workflow meshing quite seamlessly with the rest of your daily life. I imagine an inkjet printer, perhaps in a small room in your house, your phone on the table, in your pocket, or in your hand capturing your son, or a small group of flowers in front of you, or the cut of a piece of clothing you like the way the light is falling on. Do you think the ease and accessibility of your process now are essential to your work? I imagine it must lead to a continuum of experimentation that would be quite nice to be at the center of.

PJ: The time between taking a photographic image and processing it through my monolithographic/watercolour technique onto fabric can be quite quick, and yes, I think this relative ease and accessibility of my process is now essential to my work. It has allowed me to be more playful and experimental and to take more risks with the images and materials I am using. The etching press itself leaves traces of this speed in the artworks through creases and folds, capturing immediacy. 

Although the process I use now is relatively fast, this pace is only possible because of the skills I spent many years developing through a time-consuming dedication to traditional and laborious printmaking and painting techniques. Now, I can use these skills in a very spontaneous and free way. I am interested in the way understandings of time can be embedded in objects, and I try to explore and disrupt this through the processes and materials. When people document and broadcast personal experiences in almost real-time on social media image platforms, I think their understanding of their own surroundings become diminished. Relationships to these slippery, transitory virtual images become more intimate than to physical lived experiences and objects. It’s important to me that I feel a personal connection to the places and objects I depict in my work and the materials I use to make it.



Feature image: Poppy Jones, Shell, 2022. Courtesy of Herald St, London; Mai 36, Zurich; and Overduin & Co., Los Angeles. Photo: Rob Harris