Writing on Stone: the generative intersection between language and lithography

A world of academic discourse that shares knowledge through the written word, and an expanded field of artists’ printmaking, writing, and drawing frame this practice-led research, in which I explore the generative intersection between stone lithography and language. Prompted by the question how do the practices and processes of stone lithography engender language in the making? the inquiry speculatively explores the relationship between stone lithography and language; language being understood in its widest sense as written text, embodied, vocal and tacit communication, symbolic and excess information, visual image, and the means through which thought becomes manifest and subjectivity is expressed. At the core of the inquiry is the artisanal practice of stone lithography: a technology that led the development of printed communications in the 19th century as both a method of mass communication, and an emerging artists’ technique. Invented by the aspiring Bavarian playwright Alois Senefelder (1771-1834) as a means to disseminate his scripts for performance, stone lithography also had a significant impact on the world of music publishing and facilitated the global distribution of cheaply available sheet music. I draw on this lyrical inheritance of song, dance and spoken word, and on the dark legacies of colonialism that laid the ground for the development of lithography in the Age of Empire. In the light of these historic contexts, my own studio practice and a transdisciplinary field of knowledge, this response to the research question above is a diverse collection of texts that explore the multi-modal breadth of lithographic language making. Comprising creative narrative, critical reflection, historical survey, poetry, video material and a bookwork of hand-coloured stone lithographs, these works both theoretically consider the significance of the research question and are the outcomes of a litho-graphic practice of inscription, through which I hope to demonstrate the particularities and nature of the heterogeneous modes of language engendered by stone lithography. The matrix that holds these disparate elements together, is a lithographic methodology that pays attention to Irit Rogoff’s call for research methodologies that emulate the conditions of the practice; Gilbert Simondon’s (1924-1989) incidental remark on the nature of artisan lithographers in his thesis on the culture of technology, On The Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (2017); a trio of scholars who develop Simondonian trajectories (namely Elizabeth Grosz, Erin Manning and Cecile Malaspina); and the chemically metastable conditions and potential to generate information, of lithographically prepared Bavarian limestone.I write as a lithographer and artist, and in kind with others mentioned in the thesis (e.g. Croft; Jones), my practice is intrinsic to this research. However, written knowledge gleaned from the workshop and authored by lithographers has previously focussed by and large, on historical, anecdotal, or technical aspects of the process. Alternatively, I reflect on the wider critical significance of this practice. And by way of the transdisciplinary conversations of this practice-led research, propose that this exploration of the engendering potential of stone lithography, makes a unique contribution to critical discourse in printmaking, and to the wider fields of visual arts and the humanities.