In 1985, when I was invited by Andrea Callard to edition a print, my work had been transitioning from small handheld objects, the ‘tools of the trade’, to larger objects, referential to the body and identifiable as domestic in nature. I had begun covertly sourcing material from surrounding scrapyards, culling parts from obsolete appliances, salvaging components out of which came new work.

I remember being overcome by the scale of trash generated by the west’s consumer society obsession with the new, and although I found it useful foraging for parts, the experience was one of sinking within an emergent crisis. 40 years later the perpetual cycling of invention, obsolescence and waste has increased unabated.

From the perspective of 2023, I imagine what I might have been thinking in the making of this print. The fulcrum of the whirlpool provided an image within which to signify a perpetual cycle of excess. Locked within the swirl are referential signs, or hieroglyphs, iterations of ‘tools of the trade’. These hieroglyphic signs produced by the human hand abetted by the presence of the primate thumb, conjure the human desire to invent, control and consume.

I am not a print maker, in fact, this is the only print I have ever produced. My image making on paper is historically consigned solely to notation within my notebooks from which this image would have been iterated.

It would have been Andrea’s gentle prodding and assist in transcribing those scribbles onto the screen that would have brought this small project to fruition. So, thank you, Andrea.

Ann Messner 2023