FIREDAMP: REVISITING THE FLOOD
In a new exhibition at Edinburgh Printmakers, Canadian artist Sean Caulfield addresses problems close to his heart.
How can the requirement for industrial and urban growth in his native Alberta be reconciled with preserving the area’s fragile natural environment?
Firedamp – named in the exhibition's title – is any explosively inflammable vapour found in mines and boreholes. The Flood recalls the destructive consequences of divine retribution and tsunamis. As Caulfield writes:
Confronting social and environmental change is complex and evokes a strong sense of communal anxiety around political and cultural issues, as well as intensely personal questions related to one’s place in the larger fabric of the landscape, environment and world.
Caulfield’s concerns are specific to a time and place, but also have historic and universal resonances. He explores these through relief and intaglio prints, some of them combined to form huge images that cover a wall. He depicts dreamlike, unpeopled landscapes combining fire and water, evolving organic forms, the expenditure of energy and the transformation of one material into another.
He is interested in pivots of change and crisis, alert to these moments’ potential for ‘rebirth, courage and growth’.
It is hard to pin particular definitions onto particular prints, Caulfield's technique being more suggestive than literal. There is an intimacy about these works, an allusive familiarity that arises partly from the artist’s decision to examine technological complexity by using woodblock – the earliest form of printing. The complication of science is reduced to graspable forms whose original process we can understand.
In parallel, the babel of arguments is stripped to its essentials in ‘a unique graphic language that seems ideally suited to exploring contemporary feelings of anxiety and fear associated with environmental change’.
I found the effect sombre and thought-provoking, and a timely challenge to complacency.—AM
Firedamp: Revisiting the Flood continues at Edinburgh Printmakers (23 Union Street) until 15 April. Entry free.
