Fergus Berney-Gibson, The Scrum, 2025, community-sourced amyl nitrate and pigment on cotton/polyester boys athletic socks, stainless steel, thread, 100 x 100cm. Photo: Jessica Maurer.
Printmaking is an art form that constantly reinvents itself. Born of technology with the invention of the printing press in 15th century Europe, printmaking has continually absorbed new technologies. It embraced lithography when it was invented in the late 18th century, absorbed photography in the 19th century and incorporated digital technologies in the 20th century.
Many art forms view new technologies as a threat; printmaking generally views them as an opportunity through which to expand its toolbox. For example, photographic and digital techniques are frequently employed by many contemporary Australian printmakers. This is not to say that some printmakers may be perfectly happy employing woodcuts, engravings and etchings – printmaking technologies that are now centuries old – and use them for startling and contemporary purposes.
On occasion, I have encountered the same printmaker resolving design in Photoshop, digitally transferring it onto the wooden matrix, then painstakingly carving it out by hand, inking up the individual blocks, and printing out an edition by hand on a hundred-year-old printing press.
The Hard/Soft exhibition at Megalo demonstrates the remarkable technical and conceptual fluidity of printmaking. It was curated by More Than Reproduction (MTR), a Sydney-based artist-run initiative for female-identifying and gender fluid artists.
It was co-founded by Jennifer Brady, Millie Mitchell and Sarah Rose as a body devoted to building up printmaking practices and creating a creative community of printmakers. The curators explain the choice of the title, Hard/Soft, for their exhibition as something that characterises printmaking practice with the combination of opposites, such as the use of a hard metal matrix being pressed into soft, damp paper to create the print.
The four artists in this exhibition, Fergus Berney-Gibson, Annabelle McEwen, Linda Sok and Maddison Wandel, from different perspectives, tackle the idea of hard/soft.
Berney-Gibson in his piece The Scrum, 2025, has assembled a large collection of cotton/polyester boys athletic socks that he has joined together with thread and stretched over four stainless steel towel rails. On these, he has screenprinted various body parts. The narrative is not prescriptive and the viewer is allowed to build multiple associations while being reminded that the artist states that he explores these intricate rituals through a ‘queer lens’.
Maddison Wandel, A Calling Back, 2024, pewter impressions of door frame, door and wall, dimensions variable. Photo: Kim Feng
Maddison Wandel’s work, A Calling Back, 2024, is difficult to photograph and consists of three pewter impressions of a damaged door frame, door and walls. The artist revisited her childhood homes, where she took impressions from the physical marks left on the walls from incidents of abuse. From these, she made plaster casts and then poured pewter into these casts, and these became the exhibits.
These enigmatic objects that look small and insignificant on the walls of the gallery speak of the long-lasting effects of domestic violence, where the scars continue a long time after the moment of impact.
Annabelle McEwen, Embrace, 2025, silicone, protein powder, resin, 3D printed polylactic acid clamps. 30 x 30 x 2cm. Photo: Annabelle McEwen.
McEwen is technically more adventurous than any of her co-exhibitors and embraces 3D printed elements and image transfers on polylactic acid as she examines the impact of digital technologies on the way we and others see our bodies. She establishes a tantalising tension between the depersonalising and ever-expanding virtual technologies and the focused materiality of printmaking.
Linda Sok, Deities in Temples XIV, 2025, visuals drawn by family members, silk threads (painted then woven), dye, air-dry clay, 137 x 213cm. Photo: Silversalt Photography.
Sok is an artist who draws on her Cambodian cultural background and employs her art to “unwind and untangle personal and historical traumas”. Her Deities in Temples XIV, 2025, is a monumental tour de force installation dazzling in its sense of presence. She creates her own personal quasi-mythology where elements are drawn by family members and silk threads are printed, then woven and interspersed with dry clay. Employing the Pidan, a poly-chromatic weft silk weaving tradition that was largely destroyed during the Khmer Rouge regime, Sok attempts to resurrect and connect to this lost heritage. The result is a sombre celebration of some enigmatic sacred ritual that is beautiful, tantalising, but somewhat inaccessible.
Hard/Soft is not an easy exhibition to view, but it is rewarding if you make the effort. Hard/Soft is at the Megalo Print Studio, 21 Wentworth Avenue, Kingston, from 23 August to 4 October, from Tuesday to Saturday, 9:30 am to 5 pm. Admission is free.
