Artist Statement
Deli Sacilotto is credited with printing the first three-colour flat-plate photogravure prints in 1985 at Graphicstudio of Robert Mapplethorpe’s portraits of Ken Moody. Since then very few have successfully worked with this difficult and demanding process outside of commercial roto-gravure contexts.
In our photogravure research, Marlene MacCallum and I made it a point to successfully print CMYK photogravures. In 2007 digital technologies allowed us to make separation positives on a large format digital printer. These were used to create four copper plates, each etched traditionally like all photogravures. The final gravure print was sequentially hand-printed on an intaglio press employing a pin-registration system.
The rare, hand-pulled, four-plate CMYK photogravure for the Child’s Grave print, include this fourth plate (black) to make it a true CMYK image along with the usual cyan, magenta and yellow plates. Also see a detail of the gravure print.
Other examples of my CMYK work include: Suitcase, Carmen, Hygiene, and in the bookwork: DIED.