Lacon, A., 2018.

Fragment

This series of unique relief prints was created as part of our DCA Editions programme following Andrew Lacon's solo exhibition Fragments in DCA galleries.

Lacon has long been interested in how public displays of objects can explore relationships between national culture, social class and artistic intention. His exhibition considered these ideas by focusing on one single raw material now synonymous with the history of art and architecture: marble.

The exhibition took the form of a single object: a terrazzo marble floor. Created entirely by the artist's own hand, the floor was made from a concrete base mixed with marble chips, marble dust and bright pigments which were poured into casts and then ground and buffed back once dry. The work's design - in structural, aesthetic and conceptual terms - referenced a wide range of touchstones, from pre-Hispanic Aztec facades in Mexico, to ubiquitous crazy paving closer to home in the UK.

For his edition, Lacon worked with DCA Print Studio to create handmade paper incorporating fine marble dust that gives a tactile, textured surface with a subtle sparkle. He then took broken terrazzo pieces from his floor installation and, on the print studio floor, broke them with a hammer into smaller fragments.

Combining these raw materials in a way that is more sculptural than graphic, the flooring scraps were hand-printed, according to Lacon's direction, in random arrangements using five different colours from the same palette as his installation. The ink was transferred using physical pressure to the back of the paper leaving a slightly embossed edge that hints at the weight of the sculptural elements.

This resulted in a series of unique prints from which Lacon further selected to make the variations in the edition. The title for the edition, Fragment, suggests the connection of these works to Lacon's DCA exhibition as well as describing the way in which each individual print is a part of the whole edition which, like the terrazzo pieces, may be moved, re-distributed and read in different ways.