|Dr Paul Thirkell
Senior Research Fellow
Paul’s research is principally driven by a keen interest in print, developed through a long and active career as a fine art print practitioner and researcher. His quest to extend the expressive range of print has led to a rigorous investigation into the use of techniques that fall beyond the traditional borders of fine art print. These have focussed on both old and new processes that indicate a high capacity for rendering both graphic and photographic imagery with little or no colour or tonal distortion from the source. This seam of research has proven to hold rich implications for artists and industry alike and has assisted in generating major project funding for the Centre for Fine Print Research.
The area of specialism that has emerged from Paul’s research initially centred on the re-evaluation of a number of high quality 19th century photomechanical printing techniques that were either marginalised or made industrially extinct in the early part of the 20th century. Through examining the technique and capabilities of processes such as photogravure, woodburytype and collotype and the prints they produced, valuable insights and approaches lost to mainstream print practice have emerged. Paul’s sustained involvement with the process of collotype has established his status as a leading expert in the field. In January 2005 he brought together representatives from the world’s remaining collotype ateliers and individual practitioners for the 2nd international collotype conference held in Bristol.
Paul also runs the UK’s only collotype studio where he has collaboratively produced prints for an international range of artists included in its Original/Reproduction portfolio publication. He also runs workshops and produces his own work in collotype. One of Paul’s main contributions to the field is the integration of digital imaging with collotype in order to bring about a new creative flexibility whilst at the same time exploiting its unique traditional strengths in rendering high fidelity colour and tone. As well as its technique, Paul is also fascinated by the theoretical implications of intermittent use of collotype by a small number of cutting edge artist’s throughout modern and post modern art history . One of his reflections on this strand of research – an essay, “Typo Topography- Duchamp and Hamiltons Dialogue in Print”- has been published on the Tate Gallery website through Tate Papers.
As well as collotype, insights into the obscure woodburytype process have also assisted in generating a strand of CFPR research that has successfully re-established and extended a lost continuous tone photoceramic technique. The process, originally developed by George Cartlidge of Stoke on Trent in the 1890’s, enabled the production of a glazed relief image (portraits in the case of Cartlidge) with highly photographic qualities. Through the use of 3D rendering software and CNC milling, the project undertaken by Thirkell and Huson has translated the unique principles of the Woodburytype and Cartlidges technique for the production of digitally mediated images in glazed ceramic reliefs. Ceramic tile artwork exploring this new version of the technique has been created by a range of contemporary artists brought together by the research team was exhibited alongside George Cartlidge’s tiles at the Stoke City Pottery Museum in 2004.
Besides producing print based artwork of his own for exhibit on a national and international level, Paul’s insights into the history and practice of printmaking has made him a keen commentator on print. This strand of interest has led to the curation of several exhibitions illustrating ideas about past and future directions in print. The exhibition ‘A Borderless State’ curated by Paul and held at the Miskolc Museum of Fine Art, Hungary in 2004 drew together digitally mediated works by artists from Argentina, Norway, Australia and the UK to examine how traditionally rigid barriers of print have begun to dissolve through the artists appropriation of digitally mediated techniques. Paul also curated the 2006 Collotype past and Present exhibition held at the Saint Bride Printing Library which wove together unique insights into the past functions and contemporary concerns of the collotype printing industry and individual practitioners from an international perspective. Prints in this exhibition represented work by renowned ateliers of the past as well as the world’s current surviving studios.
Other insights into contemporary and past print have been presented and published as proceedings of some of the numerous national and international conferences that Paul has participated in.
Paul's current CV
contact: Paul.Thirkell@uwe.ac.uk