Lyra Garcellano featured BMW artist at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute
Day 1: Morning powwow with printer Chong Li Sze who was the first to tell me if my ideas were feasible or not, given the 14 days (minus the weekends) to come up with something.
Day 1 (midday): Because I wanted to explore a kind of painterly appeal in prints, I am put to the task of trying out different inks, solvents and metal sheets. Apparently working with sticky inks isn’t at all easy.
Day 3, I think: Still tweaking the ideas. But in order to fast track the “tweaks’, we switched on the projectors.
The image on my left is the result of what Chief Printer Eitaro Ogawa tells me - how the printing process should be: from light to dark (whereas the painting process is the opposite, which is dark to light). I still am confused. I worked on another piece using lithograph process instead.
Printer Oh Thiam Guan helped me with making the screens for the maps. Almost a week of seemingly never ending squiggly lines!
In just a few days I’ve made a nest out of the entire studio space. With a lot of ideas to work on, we also have a lot of ideas to throw out. That’s Li Sze in the background.
Mid-week: “To use or not to use the map (or the frame)" -- That is the question.
Still trying to see which idea would fly.
Guan and I taking some time out “framing” each rejected monoprint.
As a result of a brainstorm (or not!), Eitaro, Li Sze, Guan and I thought maybe we can add texture to the frames by adding some frills. By the end of the week, the frills had to go.
Working on the screens is one tedious layer after another. Easy program work but I wish I had cable television sounds in the background to complete the drone.
Trying to be a bit more organized on paper. White frilly lace (on the left), for an attempt at texture, didn’t stand a chance.
Team Shadow: Li Sze, Eitaro, Guan, and me.
In the end, I finally settled on shades of red for the map on top of my images. Initially, I thought the works looked a bit too rigid so I let the colors bleed by spraying on water and “shepherding” out the liquid before the ink dried.
Eitaro working on the screen prints.
Li Sze and I moved to the guest studio and did screen print minus the contraptions. The table we used above is one of my favorite tables of all time. It’s a mechanized table that sucks out air so papers lie flat on the surface. It’s like an air-hockey table.
Taking a breather in between prints at the big studio one floor below where all of STPI’s big machines are located.
The water bottle with the green squeezer (on the table) is one of the more important tools of the trade for this day.
Working on the temps perdu series. Other than the given screenprinting technique rules, Guan and I had our moves choreographed. He runs to and from the cleaning and screenprint machine making sure the ink on the screen doesn’t dry up in between prints while I do my running from screen print to the drying racks with the sheets and plastic screens for our “shadows”.
Day 12: Last day of the residency. We finally got the Nimbus series up.
Portraits of shadows. One of the temps perdu series.
One of six works in the Nimbus series. If one looks closer he or she can see a faint outline of a person within the frame.
About Lyra Garcellano
Lyra Abueg Garcellano was born in 1972 in Manila, Philippines, and graduated from the Ateneo de Manila University with a BA in Interdisciplinary Studies (1994) and from the University of the Philippines with a BFA (2000). She has held numerous solo exhibitions and was an artist in residence for the Cemeti Art Foundation in Jogjakarta, Indonesia, which was made possible through the UNESCO-ASCHBERG Bursaries for Artists in 2002, and a residency in Location One New York through the Asian Cultural Council. She has also participated in countless international group exhibitions, including Post-Tsunami Art, Emerging Artists from Southeast Asia (2009, Milan, Italy), Jakarta Biennale XIII (2009, Jakarta), and the 2002 Gwangju Biennale. She will be featured in the current Jakarta Biennale #14 of this year. Her residency at the Singapore Tyler Print institute marks her work being featured as part of the BMW Young Asian Artists Series III in Singapore.
