I am workshop leader for the Printshop at Konstnärernas Kollektivverkstad, the Artists' Collective Workshop, at KKV in Farsta, Stockholm. I also sit on the KKV board. Most of what the role involves is standing next to other people's work, not my own.
A collective workshop holds equipment no single artist could reasonably own: etching presses, a lithography setup, screen-printing bays, large-format digital printers, and the accumulated understanding of the people who use them. It is publicly supported rather than commercial. Selling work is left to each artist; the place exists to give them the machines and the room.
When I am at KKV, I print some of my own work and give my time to help other artists and photographers find their way around the printers, the papers, and what each choice does to an image.
What the substrate does to the image
The same image is a different thing on different ground. I spend a lot of time showing people this, because it is the decision nobody arrives already knowing, and the one that changes the most.
Fine-art paper holds an image flat and matte, the pigment settling into the fibre. Canvas gives it weave and the feel of a painting surface. Metallic paper carries a lustre, the image lifting and shifting as the light moves across it.
Each is a different answer. The artist choosing between them is finding out what the image wants to be.
Different disciplines, one set of machines
The reason I keep coming back to the role is the overlap. Someone who has hand-pulled screen prints on textile for thirty years and someone making their umpteenth archival pigment print stand at adjacent benches, and each one sees the other's habits as odd, then useful. A painter learns what a 16-bit colour depth can do that traditional palette mixing cannot. An analogue photographer learns to think in substrates and pigment ink. Something crosses between them that neither would have reached alone, and I learn from all of them too. That crossing is what a shared workshop holds and what I try to keep open: the person who needs the printer gets to use it, and starts to learn what it can do to what they bring.
How my own editions fit
My own work is one thread in this. I am colourblind, so I compose through intensity and contrast rather than accurate hue, an approach I call chromatic pressure. The image moves through making by hand, photography, and generative stages before it reaches anything physical, and not always in the same order. It begins and ends in my hand and my eye.
An archival pigment print, also called a giclée, is made on an inkjet printer built for the purpose, spraying pigment-based inks in fine droplets onto fine-art paper or canvas, finished so the colour holds for generations. I print my editions at my atelier and at KKV. Standing at the printer, I can pull a test, change the substrate, adjust the settings, and pull another until it carries what I want it to carry. The questions I put to the substrate are the same ones I bring to my own work. Does it make me feel?
I came to the Printshop from a creative background in design, digital, and film, and a return to Stockholm. The workshop is the part of a print most people never see, and the part I keep returning to.