Placing Place by Ben Sanderson

Accession Code: WU1138 Title: Placing Place Date completed: 2024 Classification: Print Medium: 4 plate polymer etching Height (mm): 760 Width (mm): 560 Depth (mm): Inscription: Location Name: Picture Store Location Description: Location Floor:

Courtesy the artist

Ben Sanderson was commissioned by the University to produce a print to celebrate the 60th Birthday of the University and its art collection.

He states

I thought about my time growing up in Coventry; family, friends and the people that made it home. Then I thought about the city itself, the domestic scale architecture of the lower precinct, the subways, the ring road, parks, and the medieval wall that once surrounded the city. I began to think about how a body knows a city, the daily routes you take, the cracks that you know to swerve in the pavement, the subconscious movements. Time began to move in spirals as memory tessellated into place.

Last year I wrote about a quilt my mum started making when she was eighteen. It’s built up of hexagonal shapes made from fabrics she had been collecting for years. The same sequence is repeated to form a rose-like pattern. Mum gave it to me to finish. This involved unearthing hundreds of hexagonal templates made from scraps of old Christmas cards and envelopes from her part time job at Dunlop in Leicester. These six-sided shapes dating back to the 70’s have found another new starting point in this project with Warwick university.

I became fascinated by how these templates held time and place when transferred into an image. Not just time, but a sense of connection, especially when words aren’t enough. The act of sending handwritten messages, reaching out to loved ones with a tactile gesture carries its own significance.

This four-plate photopolymer etching was made in St Erth, Cornwall with master Printmaker Simon Marsh. The first plate is printed in ochre, blue and green (a cove, a sky, a field). Abstracted forms come from the second plate which is made from mum’s hexagonal templates. A grid like pattern fragments into a spiral. Plates three and four dance around a watery border which isn’t solid in either transparency or line, restlessly sprouting new growth. Gestures simultaneously break out of the edges of previous plate lines as they jump and fall into the open space that surrounds the image.

Memories are difficult to control. Poetry seems to be a more accurate way to contemplate the way words interact in the mind. There is a blender in my studio which I use to turn offcuts and scraps of paintings into rag paper. As a surface it feels expansive in its state of becoming. The blender is collage accelerated and left to chance. The individual images become less important and the fragments build a kind of dislodged archive. Memory is embedded in the surface, comprised of small tangible moments. But the tangibility does not equal complete understanding and linear connection. The years and months turn into minutes and seconds and everything begins to feel still. It is more than just reusing old work.

Alongside the edition of 60 prints for the 60th there is a limited run of 6 prints that have been printed on handmade paper. Each surface slightly differing from the next while the print itself remains the same.