Tag Archives: graphic geography

Somerville Containerhenge

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It’s been a while, but I’m back in town and finally had a moment to post something. Just before I left I had an idea for a large-scale monumental construction based around world shipping and shipping containers. It would be modeled after the Neolithic henges of Britain and Europe, but using container ports and shipping containers as the guiding landmarks and marking stones for the piece. The center of the piece represents Somerville (or, really, any city in the world), and the directions of the 20 largest container ports in the world are marked along their Great Circle directions by containers from the largest international shipping companies. Will this ever be built? I’d love to see it, but I’m not gonna hold my breath.

Click for larger images:

Cover blurb for the Containerhenge concept

Cover blurb for the Containerhenge concept

Schematic layout of the Somerville Containerhenge, to scale.

World Tesselations

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I did some more organizing today, and took pictures of an older project from 2007 called World Tessellations. I took a icosahedral projection of the world (an isocahedron is a 3D shape having 20 triangle-shaped sides) and cut each section out of copper, then selected a piece at random and built the entire map from that piece. I did eight permutations of the map while I was at my September 2007 residency in Provincetown for my MFA:

 

Kerguelen Island Editioned

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Here’s the last of the big Plexiglas plates I had laser-cut in order to use the 44″ x 30″ paper I ordered back in February. Earlier I did the Mediterranean and the Aleutian Islands, the final one is Kerguelen Island, also known as Desolation Island. It’s an island in the South Indian Ocean, and it’s the largest bit of land for hundreds of miles in any direction. In fact, that’s the reason I noticed it in the first place—on a satellite poster of Earth that I have, Kerguelen Island sticks out pretty obviously due south of the tip of India, in the middle of nowhere. Projection distortion makes it look bigger than it is, but it’s still pretty large, about 100 miles by 100 miles.

So this is my favorite island, and this print is bigger than the other island prints I’ve done, measuring 30″ square. Here’s a series of shots taken during printing.

Kerguelen Plexi Plate

The raw Plexiglas plate, with the top protective paper removed. I leave the bottom paper on to make it less slippery, and to help keep the thin parts of the plate attached.

Inked Kerguelen Plate

The plate, inked and on the press bed, ready for paper.

Printed Kerguelen Island

The print finished, laid on the blotters to dry.

The Aleutian Islands Take a Lot of Ink

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So I went back into the print studio today, to edition another print with the large paper I got for my trip to the Vermont Studio Center in March, and never used. This print is of the Aleutian Islands. It’s full bleed, which means the plate is bigger than the paper so the black ink prints all the way to the edge. The plate is 48″ x 34″. That’s a large amount of ink. I managed to use up the rest of my can of Graphic Chemical #79 Relief Black.

Printing the Aleutians

The Aleutian Islands, ready for paper.

Editioning the Mediterranean

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Just got back from a few hours at Mixit Print Studios, where I was editioning a shaped plate print of the Mediterranean Sea. This is something of a throwback to a series I did a few years ago called Graphic Geography. This time, I’m actually editioning the plates properly and doing them much larger.

Once upon a time, I could cut these by hand using a jeweler’s saw and copper sheet. This only works for pieces with the largest dimension around 15″. This plate is acrylic plastic rendered in Adobe Illustrator and cut on a laserjet. For scale, the paper for these is 44″ x 30″.

Some pics of the process follow.

Inking the plate

Inking the plate.

Embossing of the plate after it's been run through the press.

Pulled print drying on blotter paper.