Brian D Hodgson


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Atlantic-Formed
Sea Plate


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





The Coigach Prints

I recreate and draw on the ongoing processes and forces that transform our environment, both natural and human-made, over time. I integrate this practice, myself, and my personal psychology with that environment and resulting work. It is performative and psycho-navigational: a way of finding my location and direction; my means of survival.

Continuing my search for somewhere to be, I came upon strange and beautiful mountains and coastlines in Coigach and Assynt, North-West Scotland. They have been drawing me back for a number of years and are central to my current work, for which I immerse myself in these timeless places where nature's processes are more apparent.

The work is hand drawn into grounded copper etching plates entirely on location over days; projects sometimes span years, of exploring and revisiting. I work with intense, obsessional focus and detail: while observing surface features such as rocks, vegetation and water, physically I am affected by the changing weather conditions; this experience of location is filtered and distilled into drawn marks on the plate. These marks reflect my experiences of the land on both a microscopic and macroscopic level, and my observations of the relationship between the two in the erosive processes at work on earth. When I hold a drawing needle in my hand and connect with the surface of the etching plate, I find my location.

As well as incorporating drawing, some of the work uses photographic acid etching processes on copper plates. Through the actual sea submersion of these plates on location, I am exposing the plates and the images they carry to erosion, attrition and corrasion; this erases and replaces photographic and drawn images of the Coigach coastline - itself in an ongoing state of change. The ritual of putting etching plates in rough seas, whilst being an exhilarating act, is also one of risk, carrying a real possibility of loss or even transmutation...

The acid etching process seems to compress time. The works are often ongoing: though suspended for periods of time and for printing, they are not permanently arrested in their capacity for further transformation.

The action of the sea affects both sides of the plate, as does working outside. It is an immersive experience involving the whole plate. My approach to printing can place an impression taken from both sides of the plate into a single image. Working this way with the plate as a multidimensional object suggests an effectively transparent plate in the printing.

Self-integration with environments over time, drawing, taking photographs, and the erosive processes I use, together produce artefacts and artworks that consider the meaning of an individual's actions and their finite time and space, within the vastness of existence.

Brian D Hodgson
April 2023


Future States by Brian D Hodgson
Future States #1 (2021-present (2022))
Etching
Printed on Hahnemühle natural 350 gsm
Image/plate size 32cm x 88cm
Paper size 50cm x 104cm



Future States by Brian D Hodgson
Future States #2 (2021-present (2023))
Etching
Printed on Hahnemühle natural 350 gsm
Image/plate size 32cm x 88cm (no borders)



Lost to the Sea by Brian D Hodgson
Lost to the Sea (2021-present (2023))
Etching
Printed on Hahnemühle natural 350 gsm
Image/plate size 32cm x 88cm (no borders)



Seann Creag - bleith by Brian D Hodgson
Seann Creag - bleith (1st state) (2020-present (2022))
Etching
Printed on Hahnemühle natural 350 gsm
Image/plate size TBC
Paper size 56cm x 45cm



Allt nan Uamh by Brian D Hodgson
Allt nan Uamh (2nd state) (2020-present (2022))
Etching
Printed on Hahnemühle natural 350 gsm
Image/plate size 19cm x 24cm
Paper size 34cm x 38cm



Night Drawing Summertide by Brian D Hodgson
Night Drawing Summertide (2nd state) (2021-present (2022))
Etching
Printed on Hahnemühle natural 350 gsm
Image/plate size TBC
Paper size 45cm x 53cm








DARK SNOW by Brian D Hodgson
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 by Brian D Hodgson
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 by Brian D Hodgson
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' by Brian D Hodgson
Attrition (2011)
Etching
Edition size 10
Image size 9cm x 16cm
Printed on Somerset Satin White


'Corrasion' by Brian D Hodgson
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.


'Traverse I' by Brian D Hodgson
Traverse I (2015)
Photopolymer intaglio print with etching
11cm x 16cm


'Traverse I' by Brian D Hodgson
Traverse II (2015)
Photopolymer intaglio print with etching
11cm x 16cm


'Traverse I' by Brian D Hodgson
Traverse III (2015)
Photopolymer intaglio print with etching
11cm x 16cm


'Traverse I' by Brian D Hodgson
Traverse IV (2015)
Photopolymer intaglio print with etching
11cm x 16cm


'Traverse I' by Brian D Hodgson
Traverse V (2015)
Photopolymer intaglio print with etching
11cm x 16cm


'Time' by Brian D Hodgson
Time (2012)
Etching
Edition size 10
Image size 41cm x 61cm
Printed on Somerset Velvet Soft White


'Time (detail)' by Brian D Hodgson
Time (detail)


'Gravity' by Brian D Hodgson
Gravity (2012)
Etching
Edition size 10
Image size 60cm x 49cm
Printed on Somerset Velvet Soft White


'Gravity (detail)' by Brian D Hodgson
Gravity (detail)


'Serendipity' by Brian D Hodgson
Serendipity (2012)
Etching
Edition size 10
Image size 49cm x 73cm
Printed on Somerset Velvet Soft White


'Serendipity (detail)' by Brian D Hodgson
Serendipity (detail)


'Spurting' by Brian D Hodgson Detail of 'Spurting' by Brian D Hodgson
Spurting (2000) Spurting (detail)
Etching
Edition size 10
Image size 121cm x 30cm
Printed on Somerset Satin White


© Brian D Hodgson




© Brian D Hodgson