In Arles, Mariana Cook showed us this portfolio. We wanted to share it with you, along with her text.
One rarely sees evidence of the human hand in contemporary art and when in 2017, I visited Factum Arte, an art fabrication company based in Madrid, my eyes were drawn most to simple well-worn tools used by Factum’s artisans and strewn about the factory. Alive from wear, I felt compelled to photograph these “taken for granted” objects as I would unique human subjects –– as a kind of portraiture. To convey their three-dimensionality as I had rendered it on film, I pressed Factum to invent a new method of printmaking. Success was met in combining aquatint (oil base) and the soft spray of pigment using piezo technology (water base). Printed in an edition of ten, a number of the portfolios are held in both private and public collections. I am delighted they can be seen by the public at the Bibliothèque National in Paris, The National Gallery of Canada, and The Carnegie Museum of Art in the United States.
Mariana Cook
