What's on?
Print Festival Scotland – a partnership between Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) and Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design (DJCAD), invites you to explore a vast hand-printed city at this year’s Dundee Design Festival in West Ward Works. Print City will be a monumental, immersive installation built from hundreds of large-scale, hand-printed cardboard building blocks that come together to form an abstract cityscape. The work will be fabricated on site in line with the ‘Factory Floor’ theme of this year’s event. Visitors will be able to see the city’s buildings being printed and constructed throughout the festival. The Print City team will create a factory production line in the former D.C. Thomson’s printworks, to print striking monochrome designs and patterns onto the hundreds of cardboard surfaces that will form this evolving and dazzling spectacle. As the city takes shape, audiences will be able to participate in the production and interact with the artists. They will be able to walk through its streets, sit in its park or watch boats in the harbour – and maybe even help to print a building or two. The work in its entirety is also intended as a platform or backdrop for further interaction and activity – and to this end, there will be several interventions taking place by
other artists and artists groups.
The construction is based on a set of seven interlocking geometric/architectural shapes that have a playful association with children’s games. The surface designs have been compiled and collaged from a multitude of drawings and illustrations created by participants of all ages in a series of public workshops at the Visual Research Centre, DCA earlier this year.
Participants were asked to draw their own visions of the city – their personal experiences of the buildings and structures that form their environment, as well as their imagined possibilities of what the city might be in future, for example. These works have been integrated with a selection of historic images, illustrations and documentary photographs of Dundee.
The origins of the project are rooted in both the rich history of print and the vibrant contemporary culture of printmaking that exists in Dundee. These features are evident in both the history of the building that hosts the festival and the outstanding print facilities and community of printmakers in Dundee that have made Print Festival Scotland and Print City possible.
This project is a celebration of this heritage and an opportunity to explore collectively our relationships with both Print and the city.
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