The Editions
Petros’ botanical collection, Off-cuts, Europa, Lumieres, Planets, Flat Holm, Bristol Retail Centres, Weeds, Molecules, Space Time, Plant Paint, Money Printer and Metamorphosis.
Two Kinds of Subject
The observed group takes something that existed and reduces it to separable flat colours — the botanical work, Weeds, Plant Paint, Off-cuts, Flat Holm and Bristol Retail Centres. Reduction is the interesting part: deciding which three or four colours carry a plant, and accepting that everything else has to go.
The constructed group assembles an image that was never in front of anyone: Molecules, Space Time, Planets, Europa, Lumieres and Metamorphosis. Here the flat colour is not a reduction of something but the native language of the picture.
Money Printer sits between the two, staging an invented machine as though it were a technical drawing of a real one.
What the Specification Means
Each edition lists a colour count, a sheet size, a paper stock and an edition size, and the first of those drives the rest. Three colours means three screens exposed, three registrations aligned and three drying cycles for every sheet, so the colour count multiplies the whole run instead of adding to it.
Edition sizes are the number of copies that exist. Where part of an edition was folded into books rather than sold flat, as with Money Printer, the split is recorded.
Where the Editions Were Printed
The prints were not all pulled in the same place. Screen printing began for Otto Dettmer on the MA at Kingston University in 1996, and for the fifteen years after that the work was made at open access workshops, principally Spike Print in Bristol and East London Printmakers.
An open access workshop rents time on shared equipment. It is how most printmakers without a studio of their own get access to a vacuum bed, an exposure unit and a washout booth, and it shapes what gets made: the screen has to be coated, exposed, printed and reclaimed inside a booked session, which favours smaller sheets and fewer colours.
Shared workshops favour small sheets and few colours. Marshfield lifted the clock.
In 2010 he set up his own workshop at Marshfield, near Bath, and printed the books and editions there until it closed in 2019. The constraint that lifts is time. A screen can stay in registration between sessions, a colour can dry overnight and not inside a booking, and a sheet at a metre across becomes possible because nobody else needs the bed at four o’clock.
What Edition Means on This List
Every title here is an editioned print: a fixed number of copies, pulled from the same screens, after which the stencils are reclaimed and no more exist. The number is not a marketing device but a physical fact about emulsion, which degrades through a run and cannot be matched again once the mesh is stripped.
Part-editions complicate the count in one direction only. Where sheets were folded into books instead of being sold flat, the flat edition is smaller than the printed edition, and both figures are recorded rather than the larger one alone.
Reading a Specification
Each record on this list gives the same four things, and they answer different questions. The colour count says how many times the edition passed through the press. The sheet size says how the print was meant to be seen, across a room or in the hand. The paper stock says what happened to the sheet afterwards, since a light book paper can be folded and a heavy print stock cannot. The edition size says how many exist now that the stencils have been reclaimed.
After the Edition
When a run is finished the emulsion is stripped from the mesh and the screens go back into use for the next job. Nothing is held in reserve, so an edition that sells out cannot be extended, and the number printed on a sheet is the number that will ever exist.