The Subjects
The print editions divide roughly into the observed and the constructed.
On the observed side sit the botanical work, Weeds, Plant Paint, Off-cuts and Flat Holm — studies of things that were actually in front of him, reduced to the flat separated colour the process demands. Bristol Retail Centres belongs here too, a survey of ordinary shopping parades treated with the same attention usually reserved for landmarks.
On the constructed side are Molecules, Space Time, Planets, Europa, Lumieres and Metamorphosis, where the image is assembled, never recorded.
Money Printer
The largest and most documented of the editions. The design shows a workshop containing a machine that prints money — a joke about the economics of making prints by hand, staged as a technical drawing.
It was commissioned by Sven Meier-Wiedenbach of Keine Kunst in Hannover, who took half the edition of eighty. Three colours, 102 by 72 centimetres, printed in 2011 on Heritage Bookwhite at 100gsm. Thirty of the sheets were folded and sold as books rather than kept flat.
Why the Paper Weights Are Listed
Screen printing puts down a physically thick layer of ink. On a light stock the sheet cockles as it dries and the registration of the next colour drifts; on a heavy stock the same ink sits on the surface and stays sharp. The weight is not a specification detail bolted on at the end, it is part of why a print looks the way it does, which is why it appears alongside the colour count and the edition size on every entry.
A print listed as three colours took three passes, three screens and three drying cycles, with every sheet in the edition passing through each stage in the same order.
The Workshop
The editions come from a workshop at Marshfield, near Bath, which ran from 2010 to 2019 with open access, meaning other printmakers could book time on the equipment instead of it serving one person alone.
Before that the printing was done the same way round: Otto Dettmer worked at open access workshops himself, at Spike Print in Bristol and East London Printmakers, from the point he learned the process on the MA at Kingston University in 1996. Fifteen years of renting time on someone else’s vacuum bed is a reasonable explanation for why the workshop he eventually built was opened to other people.
The arrangement leaves a mark on the editions. A workshop shared with strangers cannot hold a screen in registration indefinitely, so the jobs that need a screen to stay set up for days are the ones that waited until Marshfield.
What Gets Printed Flat and What Gets Folded
Several titles appear both in this list and in the book catalogue, because a screen printed sheet is not finished until someone decides what happens to it. Money Printer was pulled in an edition of eighty, of which thirty were folded into books and the rest kept flat.
The decision is made after the ink is dry and it changes the object completely. Flat, the sheet is one image seen at once from across a room. Folded, the same printed area becomes a sequence held at arm’s length, where no two openings show the same thing and the reader controls the order.
Same screens, same paper, same ink. Only the last operation makes it a book.
Nothing about the printing differs between the two. The screens, the registration and the paper are identical, and only the last operation separates a print from a book.
Off-Cuts
One title on the list is made from what the others left behind. Off-cuts takes the trimmed edges and test pulls that accumulate beside any press and treats them as the subject, which is a characteristic move here: the waste of the process becomes the picture rather than being swept up.