Brian D Hodgson


Brian D Hodgson

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Bio

The tools, methods and the obsessional cross-hatched lines and matrices of the old engravers really draw me in, and in practice come quite naturally to me. When I hold a steel drawing needle in my hand and push through the wax ground to connect with the metal surface of the etching plate I find my location. But that is not the whole story.

Drawings can be made in many ways, like Organised Accidents, and Actions: the printing plate as a site of significant events. Process emotion, torn out of a metal surface through the vitriolic power of Acidic Consumption. You have to dissolve in order to create.

This is the way the acid works into a drawn line: it won't behave. It side-bites, under-bites and foul-bites, producing marks born directly from corrosion and attrition, infiltrating and infecting the drawing. Utilising this, one of nature's great processes, appears to accelerate and compress time.

Take a drawing through this journey and see the markings printed, standing raised and proud from the surface of the paper like black welts. Then take a magnifying lens, and the drawing becomes a surface to climb into and explore like a new kind of space.

Brian D Hodgson
April 2017

DARK SNOW (2019)

Photopolymer intaglio print on white Magnani litho paper 350 gsm
Printed to the edge of the paper - no borders
Image size 66cm x 79cm

My practice involves making physical and mental journeys towards 'edges' found in terrain I actively seek out or find myself in.

I have also often found that accidental occurrences can carry personal meaning for me: they are significant events.

DARK SNOW uses a photograph made at a point of exhaustion, late on the second day of a Cuillin Ridge mountain traverse on the Isle of Skye. The misty outcrop of the Basteir Tooth was bypassed round its base and left unclimbed by me on that occasion.

The image was later unexpectedly invaded by a ghostly interference from a malfunctioning exposure unit in a darkroom in South London; this manifestation - an imperfect 'evaporation' - was welcomed in recognition of the beauty and potential in failure and dysfunction.

23 Days of Absorption by Brian D Hodgson

23 Days of Absorption (2019)

Etching
Printed on Hahnemühle natural 350 gsm
Image/plate size 34cm x 49cm
Paper size 51cm x 65cm

23 Days of Absorption was drawn into a grounded etching plate entirely on location in Snowdonia. Over a year I journeyed from London to sit on a rocky ledge. This precipice was attainable via a gully scramble, 100 metres below a summit, clinging to a cascade of mountainside. A precarious place to be, perched over air, 'cold hand drawing' and wet to the skin.

CHANGING CHANNELS I - significant events (2017)

Etching
Image size 49cm x 64cm
Paper size 71cm x 85cm

Visiting a place on the Northumberland coastline over twelve days, I used its unique effects of geology and sound to focus, think and draw the experience on a grounded etching plate. Sitting in this tide-filled rock amphitheatre, looking through a tunnel channelling the sea in and out, I tried to work out my psychological location.

As I was drawing, a second etching plate lay chained to a rock in the tunnel, under the sea, for one summer full moon tide.

CHANGING CHANNELS II - unexpected consequences (2017)

Etching
Image size 49cm x 64cm
Paper size 71cm x 85cm

Integrating the Sea Plate and the Drawn Plate during printing sets up a dialogue between the two plates; this forms a bridge, allowing a discourse between myself and the sea.

CHANGING CHANNELS III by Brian D Hodgson

CHANGING CHANNELS III - exits final (2017-2018)

Etching and photopolymer intaglio
Image size 49cm x 64cm
Paper size 71cm x 85cm

Using photopolymer intaglio plates, I then introduce a photographic element moving through the drawing, like my final act of swimming through the channel to the open sea, entering the image, and thereby finding my location.

Please see also the video CHANGING CHANNELS - Enter the Image on the Actions page.

Attrition (2011)

Etching
Edition size 10
Image size 9cm x 16cm
Printed on Somerset Satin White

Corrasion (2011)

Etching
Edition size 10
Image size 18cm x 25cm
Printed on Somerset Satin White

Traverse I-V (2015)

In May 2014 I made a two-day traverse of the Black Cuillin mountain range on the Isle of Skye off the north west coast of Scotland. With me on this journey I took a grounded copper printing plate, carried in my rucksack: in the bag I put two pieces of rock picked up at the beginning of the initial ascent, gabbro and basalt, which make up the majority of the ridge. They scratched through the ground of the plate as I walked, scrambled and climbed for two days, and the marks created were later deeply etched into the plate with acid. This "Traverse Plate" was printed, embossed, inverted, used as an offsetting plate, and integrated into a multi-plate series of photopolymer intaglio prints, based on a photographic image taken at a point of exhaustion towards the end of the second day.

Thus the series incorporates an embodiment of the physical experience of moving along the 12 kilometres of the ridge. Traverse I-V in itself is a series of significant events and an exploratory excursion out of its own printing system, a diversion away from pure reproduction of a photographic image.