three days hunting a ghost in my own screen, and I found it
For three days I've had a pale streak in every riso print coming off the drum, right through the middle of the image, in exactly the same place. I redid the master. Twice. I changed paper, I changed the drum, I blamed the humidity, I blamed the paper supplier, I blamed myself. This morning I finally get a loupe on the screen itself and there it is. A hair. Not a scratch, not a pinhole, a hair, dried into the emulsion from the very first coating, and I have printed two hundred sheets over it.
Two hundred sheets. Some of them were decent. All of them carry my own hair like a signature I didn't sign. And here is the thing that's actually bothering me, more than the wasted paper: I kind of like it. The streak sits there in every copy, identical, mechanical, and I would never in a hundred years have put it there on purpose. It is the only mark in the whole edition that wasn't a decision.
I have spent years thinking about the multiple, about the copy, about what gets repeated and what stays singular. Fine, theory is cheap. Then my own body quietly signs two hundred prints without asking me and I can't decide if it's a defect or the best thing in the edition. I could reprint. Part of me wants to keep them exactly as they are and say nothing, let people think I planned it.
Anyway. Off to buy a loupe that actually works, and to have a word with my head.
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Three days and two hundred sheets, that is real tapas ji, whether you wanted it or not. But I am thinking of something my mother used to say when a stray line came into a painting that we did not plan. She would never let us scrape it away completely. She said the hand will always leave its mark, and that mark is the proof that a person made this and not a machine. You were cursing that hair, but in fifty years someone may hold one of those two hundred sheets and see your own hair baked into the ink, and they will know a human being stood there with a drum and did this work, sheet after sheet. That is not nothing. Though yes, I understand, the customer does not want your signature in the middle of the fish. I hope the next batch comes clean. 🙏
I would not have argued with your mother about the hand, only about the word proof. A mark is not proof of anything by itself. Plenty of machine work carries marks too, just not marks that mean anything. The hair means something because you did not choose it, and that is a strange kind of honesty in a medium built on repeating the same thing exactly. Though I will say, two hundred sheets is not a signature. It is a period of your life.
A period of your life, yes. That is the part I keep circling back to since you said it. Two hundred sheets is not a run, it is a duration. I made a hundred and ninety nine decisions under that hair without knowing it was there, and it was patient the whole time.
You are right that a machine mark carries no meaning, meaning needs a chooser. But I think the hair is interesting precisely because nobody chose it, not me and not the press. It just entered the emulsion and stayed. It is the one mark in the whole edition that is not a decision. Which is maybe the closest a print ever gets to a signature, and ironically it is the only thing I did not sign.
I am not sure I want to remove it. That is either the honest conclusion or the rationalisation of somebody who cannot face re-coating the screen a third time.
Your mother and I would get along, I think, though I'd have argued with her in the studio. Because my whole thing is the multiple, and the point of a print is that it can be repeated, identical, no hand in it. A hair in the emulsion is exactly the accident the medium is supposed to eliminate. So the streak was a failure by my own rules.
Except it isn't identical anymore, and that's the part I've been sitting with since yesterday. Two hundred sheets, and the one thing that makes each of them a little unique is a bit of me I didn't choose to put there. I spent three days trying to make the work more machine and it got more human instead. I don't know yet if that's a gift or just a nicer word for a mistake I can't fix.