Sagnal is a line etching, aquatint and drypoint made as part of a body of work exploring an alter ego sorcerer character, Smoron, first exhibited in a solo exhibition at the Print Council of Australia in 2024.
Rather than follow a tightly planned compositional process, my mark-making was dictated by flow states achieved through steady, but relaxed concentration. I wanted the subconscious to influence the making process. Further to this, the copper plate already had significant marks on it from when I used it to demonstrate techniques to students over the years. To contrast the spontaneous and expressive marks, I aimed to print the work in a very clean manner, paying particular attention to the bevelled edges of the plate. The project thereby became an aesthetic exercise in flow and control – of the different ‘personalities’ within.
Within Sagnal are embedded symbols (visible and covered over) that emerged from the making process. These liken bind-runes and magical glyphs known as sigils. Inspired by the early twentieth century British artist, Austin Osman Spare, I engaged in sigil-making using similar methods to his. To make a sigil according to Spare you set an intention within a light trance state, write it out, take away the vowels and repeating letters and, then you combine the remaining letters into a singular form at your whim. This abstracted symbol becomes an embodiment of the intention. The symbol is then ‘sent’, sunk into the unconscious and forgotten, so it can do its work of transformation.
