M.R.L.C. Takeover: Print-making Workshop

Goethe-Institut Glasgow

Printmaking workshop by artist and award-winning printer Nkem Okwechime

STIR MIX CREATE Artist-Led Workshops

STIR MIX CREATE is an artist-led workshop series at Goethe-Institut Glasgow. Exploring creative acts as a form for temporary collectivities and as a way to connect past and present. Art and art-making as ways to imagine futures together.

Nkem Okwechime is a Glasgow-based, South London-born, Scottish-Nigerian artist and printmaker. His practice explores inherited images as a form of social commentary. Drawing on family albums as well as from public memory and the colonial archive, he fashions these images into the present moment, giving them a new context that claims space for and affirms the vital presence of Black British artists in the UK and Black lives in general. A graduate of the Glasgow School of Art, Okwechime dedicated his GSA degree show to his mother, the illustrator Mary Ruth Linton Craig, whose initials are found in the exhibition title, M.R.L.C. Takeover. Also shown in a new iteration at the Pipe Factory, the exhibition presented the artist’s designs that he incorporated into wallpaper printed in green and black and used to cover the surrounding walls. In this new environment, past and present, tradition and innovation meet and merge to create transformative perspectives. At first glance, the wallpaper evokes the 19th-century Victorian parlour but on closer inspection, the patterns reveal the artist's own images that are influenced by African designs. Another motif in a series titled One Shilling deftly reworks the images of empire, using a postage stamp from 1940s Nigeria blown up to the size of a portrait and replacing the head of the English monarch with African-derived symbols. An image of the cowrie shell, an important object that connected various West African cultures and nations, refers to an older, precolonial alternative economy of exchange based on these shells. From these blended images and invented traditions, Okwechime excavates a past that hints at a future to work towards, one that moves toward away from wrongs and towards justice.

The workshop will start with an introduction by the artist and some visual examples of prints from his own practice, in which he incorporates African designs that he has modified. Nkem will walk you through how to set up the printing press and the different effects created by using different inks and paper or textile. Participants will have a chance to experiment with printing and at the end will have something to take home.P﻿aper is supplied. Participants can also bring their own material along. For example, a t-shirt or tote bag or any kind of textile or paper that they would like to print with a design.I﻿mages are courtesy of Nkem Okwechime and are used by permission. The image for the main page for the workshop series STIR MIX CREATE is a detail from a work by Emma Lewis Jones and is used by permission.<a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/CPYMf8csTGO/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">N﻿kem Okwechime, Artist Instagram</a><a href="https://www.instagram.com/m.r.l.c_/?hl=en" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">M﻿.R.L.C. Instagram</a>

Agenda

Slide presentation and introduction to print-making

Participants experiment with print-making

Wrap-Up

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