The motility of print: the printerly and print thinking in the work of Ari Pelkonen and Inma Herrera

This article proposes motility – the self-generated capacity for independent movement – as a critical framework for a more complex understanding of the techniques and current practices of printmaking. Drawing on New Materialist notions of agency, and positing a dynamic interplay between materials, tools and makers, motility is distinguished from the more familiar notion of mobility. Two interconnected analytical concepts further develop this idea: the printerly, in which print’s material elements assume new and unexpected agency within an image-focused context; and print thinking, in which what might be called printmaking’s ‘logic’ migrates across different media. Through a close analysis of works by the Finnish artist Ari Pelkonen (b.1978) and the Spanish artist Inma Herrera (b.1986), the article aims to capture printmaking’s expansion outwards across different media at the same time as inwards, re-examining its customary materials, tools and processes. It claims not only their inherent poetic and philosophical potential, but also a politics. In this way, it shows how techniques, or ‘the physics of print’, meaningfully engage urgent ecological, philosophical, and political questions.