TWO printmakers who opt for very different techniques within the same medium are currently together at the Graphic Studio Gallery. Marc Reilly is the older of the two, while Taffina Flood is a 1991 graduate of the NCAD.
Flood's work leans heavily on colour effects, with several of the images using the key colour in their titles. The majority of these involve the carborundum printing technique, though sometimes in combination with dry point and etching. The use of carborundum tends to encourage highly characteristic particularly a translucent, three dimensional appearance to the final printed strokes.
Far from fighting the homogeneity which this idiosyncratic texture can create, Flood allows it to become central to the majority of the raw red and blue landscapes. This seems like a particularly surprising option when faced with the strongest of her work here, a large controlled image entitled Deep Pool. Completed in a far more controlled manner, this print shows the artist apparently leaving less to chance and taking sterner, tighter charge of her medium, all to positive effect.
Marc Reilly's work, too, is at its most convincing on a large, even monumental scale. While his portion of the show features a number of small, enigmatic etchings, it is in a series of, four mammoth, untitled prints that he finally produces his most convincing images.
Working on immense sheets of paper, Reilly contrasts different techniques not by overprinting them on the same image, but by reproducing them alongside one another. When he places a huge globe, built up in a web of tiny dry point lines, above a chunky gashed woodblock print, the two ricochet off one another, each technique seeming to amplify the very distinct record of labour in the other.
