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Artist: Tim Maguire

Tolarno Galleries presents Dice Blocks & Alphabets, a new exhibition of woodcut prints by Sydney-based artist Tim Maguire.

On display in Gallery 1, the exhibition brings together two new series of woodcut prints made by Maguire in collaboration with master printer Adrian Kellett of Melbourne’s Sunshine Editions.

Alphabets is a series of square-format prints created by superimposing the upper-case letters of common three-letter words, with each letter assigned its own colour: yellow for the first, magenta for the second, cyan for the third.

Maguire devised the rules for Alphabets “as a way of further removing myself from the mechanics of ‘making’ and image”, a position that has underscored much of his wide-ranging practice over the past four and a half decades.

“Beyond the concept, the only input is the choice of the word, and the choice or rejection of the result once it’s been printed, although I did design the typology for this project,” he says.

Maguire selected three-letter words because “there’s something pithy and primal about them. They are the first words we learn to read and write, and amongst the first we learn to speak,” he says.

DOG, CAT, MAN, GOD.

“Many of the words are ancient or are the basic building blocks of language,” Maguire says.

AND, THE, WHY, WHO, HOW.

“They are the most used, most familiar, most easily readable words in our vocabulary,” he says.

“Yet when these so very familiar arrangements of letters are rearranged, on top of each other instead of side-by-side, the results are surprisingly unfamiliar. Each becomes a little puzzle to be deciphered – and I do like a game.”

Bright and boldfaced, the Alphabets prints grab the viewer’s attention then keep them engaged as they deduce the process that gave rise to the image and consider each word – each letter – anew.

When two colours overlap, they produce areas of orange, green or purple. When all three colours overlap, there’s black.

Making innovative use of colour separation techniques through analogue means, Maguire has also incorporated an element of organic texture into the prints courtesy of the woodgrain found in the plywood blocks.

“The rough grain helps to break up the solids of the positive letter form,” he says.

Dice Blocks, the exhibition’s second series of square-format woodcut prints, is a further elaboration of Maguire’s ongoing Dice Abstracts project, begun in 2017.

A roll of the dice establishes the composition, colour and orientation of each layered image from a source pool of six simple charcoal drawings of dots, stripes and squares, over which Maguire has placed a half-tone dot screen to complicate the visual field.

“Because woodcut is a very binary medium and doesn’t allow for halftones, I needed to impose a dot-screen over the drawings to crest the tonal transitions,” Maguire explains.

“I was struck by the way the dot patterns combined between the three colours – yellow, magenta and cyan,” he says.

The results are optical and eerie thanks to the Ben Day-style dots that blur and merge areas of light, darkness and colour. Reminiscent of thresholds and portals, the Dice Blocks prints seem to hover in the air before one’s eyes.

As with their Alphabets cousins, the trace of the woodgrain is integral.

“There’s a nice interplay between the digital dot and the analogue grain of the plywood,” Maguire says. “The grain adds a natural, random element and also breaks up the solid colour to reintroduce white and texture while allowing the other colours to come through.”

A highly experienced printmaker himself, Maguire has worked collaboratively alongside printers such as Martin King, Kim Westcott and Neil Leveson at Australian Print Workshop, as well as Franck Bordas in Paris.

“Adrian Kellett was recommended to me,” Maguire says, “It’s been a great collaboration and I look forward to more.”

“Obviously, I’m calling the shots on what blocks for what colour, what orientation – given the blocks are square, they can be rotated – and I might make suggestions on pressure, intensity and transparency of ink. But Adrian’s the expert and I’m learning as we go along.”

all images © the gallery and the artist(s)