The Commission
The print was commissioned by Sven Meier-Wiedenbach of Keine Kunst in Hannover, who took half the edition — forty of the eighty copies.
A commission that takes half an edition changes the economics of a hand printed run completely. It guarantees the cost of the paper and the screens before a single sheet is pulled, which is what makes a print this large feasible outside a funded studio.
Specifications
- large screen print, unfolded
- 102 × 72 cm
- 3 colours
- 100gsm Heritage Bookwhite
- total edition of 80
- printed in 2011
The Folded Version
Thirty of the sheets were sold as folded books rather than kept flat, which is why the title also appears in the book catalogue. The same printed sheet becomes a different object depending on what happens after it dries — a wall piece or something read in the hand.
Few of the folded copies remained in circulation.
On the Sheet Size
At 102 by 72 centimetres this is a large screen to pull. The squeegee has to cross the full width in one even stroke, because a hesitation shows as a band of heavier ink that no later pass will hide. On 100gsm paper — light for a print this size — the sheet also has to be lifted off the mesh without creasing while the ink is still wet.
Three colours means that operation was repeated three times for every one of the eighty sheets, with registration holding across all of them.
Eighty sheets, three colours, two hundred and forty pulls, each a metre wide.
The Year It Was Printed
Money Printer is dated 2011, which is the year the Marshfield workshop opened. Before that the work was made in booked sessions at shared workshops in Bristol and London, where a sheet of this size is difficult to handle and impossible to leave drying overnight.
The date and the dimensions belong together. A print at 102 by 72 centimetres in three colours needs somewhere the screens can stay set up between passes, and this is the first edition in the list that takes advantage of having exactly that.
Where It Sits Among the Editions
The print list divides between subjects that were observed and subjects that were assembled. The botanical work, the weeds, the off-cuts and the Bristol retail centres reduce something real to separable flat colours. Molecules, Space Time, Planets and Lumieres build an image that was never in front of anyone.
Money Printer is the one title that borrows the manner of the first group to serve the second. The machine is drawn with the flat, labelled clarity of a technical illustration, and the joke depends entirely on that restraint: a picture of a device for making money, rendered as though the device were ordinary equipment with a maintenance schedule.
Three Colours, Eighty Sheets
The colour count multiplies everything. Eighty copies in three colours is two hundred and forty separate pulls, and each sheet passes through the process four times counting the final drying, so the edition represents something closer to three hundred and twenty individual handlings of a sheet a metre wide.
Between each colour the whole edition has to dry. Screen printing ink sits on the surface rather than soaking in, and a second pass onto ink that is still soft lifts it off onto the back of the mesh. On sheets this size that means eighty of them occupying drying racks or laid out flat, and the next colour cannot start until the last of them is ready.
Registration is what makes the arithmetic unforgiving. Each sheet has to sit in the same position relative to the screen on all three passes, and a shift of a millimetre on the third colour is visible on a print viewed from across a room. Sheets that drift are pulled out of the edition, which is why the printed run is always larger than the numbered one.
The Paper
Heritage Bookwhite at 100gsm is a light stock for a print of this size, closer to a book paper than to a print paper, and the choice connects this sheet to the books instead of to the framed editions.
A light sheet is harder to handle wet. It has to be lifted cleanly off the mesh at the end of each pass without creasing, and it wants to cockle as the ink dries. It is also the reason thirty of these sheets could be folded into books afterwards: a heavier print stock would not take a fold without cracking through the ink.