Emotional labour of social practice artists: moving towards sustainable collective care

Through conversations between the artist Alberta Whittle (b.1980), master printer Annis Fitzhugh and researcher Sandra De Rycker, this article commission examines the collaborative processes underlying Whittle’s print projects at Dundee Contemporary Arts Print Studio between 2019 and 2023. Drawing on workshop exchanges, technical experiments and an informal archive of proofs, ephemera, recordings and photographic documentation, it considers how trust, intimacy and care inform material and conceptual decisions. Experiments using snail trails to obscure colonial figures in reworked engravings by Theodor de Bry connect printmaking processes to histories of migration, contagion and settler colonialism. Alongside these works, discussion of ‘Invest in Love’ (2020) and ‘Jamestown Mythology: Amonute (copper bottom)’ (2023) examines how writing, bodily traces and metallic surfaces contest established forms of historical representation. Whittle’s reconfiguration of printing matrices as sculptural works further complicates art-historical distinctions between process, object and final print, challenging hierarchies that privilege the finished impression over the materials, knowledge and collaborative labour involved in its production.