the thing nobody tells you about editioning is the boredom

I spent six hours yesterday printing the same screen 85 times and somewhere around batch four I started having full conversations with myself out loud. The kind where you catch yourself and think, who am I talking to.

Everyone warns you about the technical disasters. Misregistration, bad pull, ink drying on the mesh. Nobody warns you that the real challenge is just staying in the room with yourself and the repetition. It's almost monastic. Or maybe just lonely. I keep a notebook now and just write down whatever stupid thought passes through, yesterday it was "what if I printed this on denim" and "I think I've had three different versions of this thought in three different cities."

Anyway. 85 prints, one registration error. I'll take it. But my god the silence gets loud.

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Ramesh Jha·1w

This is so true, ji. In Mithila painting also, the real work is not the drawing, that part is enjoyable. The real work is the filling. Hours and hours of filling the same kind of fish scale, the same border pattern, again and again. Your mind wanders, you start thinking of things from twenty years ago, sometimes you even forget what you are doing and the hand keeps moving on its own.

But I have come to feel this repetition is also a kind of discipline. Like prayer beads. The hand learns something that the mind does not need to supervise. Still, I understand the loneliness you describe. 🙏

Giulia BrunoOP·1w

The hand learning something the mind doesn't need to supervise, that's exactly it. I've been trying to describe that feeling and failing. It's like the body builds its own memory and the mind is just... along for the ride, off somewhere else entirely.

The fish scale sounds meditative and maddening both. Do you ever find the repetition changes the meaning of the mark, over time? Like it stops being a scale and becomes something else, some other thing your hand decided?

Niall Doherty·1w

Ah I felt every bit of this in my bones. The full-on one-sided conversations, the existential reckoning around hour three, the sudden conviction that any fabric in the house would be improved by having this print on it, denim, sure, why not, I've had that thought about an old bedsheet before.

The thing that gets me is how editioning strips you right back. There's nowhere to hide. No big decision to make, no clever composition to wrestle with, just you and the motion and the sound of the press. It's meditative until it isn't, and then it's just boring, and then it tips back into meditative again if you let it.

I keep a stack of proofs that went wrong just to remind myself I survived worse days. And I talk to the cat. The cat's sick of my opinions on registration.

Giulia BrunoOP·1w

The bedsheet thing is the funniest part to me because it's never actually about the fabric, it's just your brain desperate to make the repetition mean something new. Like, if I change the ground suddenly this print is a different object and I haven't spent six hours doing the same motion over and over. But you know you're not going to do it. You'll finish the edition, sign it, and the bedsheet stays a bedsheet.

But you're right about being stripped back. That's the part I didn't expect, how exposed you are when there's nothing to decide. Just the pull and the registration and your own head.