Hopefully…. I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, but stuff just kept getting in the way. But finally I’ve done it! The prints are available on my Etsy store and I will be donating 50% of the print price to help celebrate 50 Years of Amnesty International. Amnesty is a charity I’ve been donating to for a few years via my bank and through buying fair trade goods from their shop, but this year I’m hoping to donate more through my art. Amnesty struck a chord with me more so than most others is that the things they fight for – human rights, just seem insane. I really can’t imagine living in a world where I could be thrown in prison for calling David Cameron a plonker or where my friends could be sentenced for life in prison, or death because they happen to love someone of the same gender, or as a female being denied the right to vote or to be forced to marry someone old enough to be my grandad as a teenager.
The prints I’ve made are based on my trips to Tunisia, a country I love and have talked about moving to with the husband sometime in the future, somewhere I which in 2010 was brought to the world media attention with the death of Mohamed Bouazizi a man who set himself on fire in protest at his treatment by a municipal officer, this resulted in the Tunisian Revolution and the Arab Spring, which I’m sure you must have heard about in the media over the past 2 years. For us like I’m sure many tourists who’ve visited Tunisia it was a bit of a shock as the country appeared on the surface as fairly progressive (for an Arab country) where women’s right etc where concerned although the censorship of the internet I suppose hinted at a bigger picture. OK enough of the spiel and lecture. You can find out more about Amnesty’s work here or go straight to my shop here to pick up one of these lovely hot pink screen prints.Stop reading now if printmaking techniques send you to sleep…
There are 50 prints available in total (keeping on the theme of Amnesty at 50), 25 of each design and although screen prints usually scream mass production, each one is unique as I used a method of ‘wet tear’ stencil to create the wash of colour, which creates a rough painterly style edge, the stencil then slightly degrades with each pull of colour creating interesting effects with bleeding edges etc, some prints got 2 pulls of colour which creates a deeper & darker pink. The black photographic image is taken from a photo which is run through photoshop to turn it B&W and make it suitable for transfering to a photo-screen, then enlarged on an old style photocopier (none of those laser ones, they’re too perfect. Each step degrades the image further and further something I tend to do a lot with my printmaking processes.
Tunisia Screen Prints – Amnesty at 50
The images I chose to use were from Dougga, a well preserved ruins site from the Roman Invasion.. And Voila here you have each design, and you can see what it looks like framed, if you live in the UK I can offer it framed too, but it takes slightly longer to ship…. happy shopping
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Love them bb. 🙂