matrix

impact | art history module | objectives | publications | outputs

A practitioner-led
route to impact🡮

NET-ZERO IMPRESSIONS translates the output of the PI’s work on historical waste into contemporary recommendations for how creative practitioners could work more sustainably in local and regional printrooms to respond to Scotland’s climate and environment challenges.

net-zero press forges
new connections across Fife, Glasgow, and Edinburgh
at the university,
and community
-organization level 🡯

art history

It strengthens existing relationships with community arts groups previously established through the School of Art History’s MLitt module, “Art History in the Studio: Process, Materials, Technique.”

objectives

Joining other net–zero environmental initiatives across Scotland, this project will yield:

(a) improved creative practices, reducing waste in printmaking activities and encouraging the switch to more local and less industrially intensive sourcing for materials;

(b) enhanced skills and knowledge, using a storytelling, narrative-driven model for collaboration and knowledge exchange, based on the dissemination of single-object vignettes on an open-access website;

(c) changes in attitudes and perspectives, as practitioners and researchers collaborate to make actionable recommendations for switching out materials and adopting new practices in the printrooms of the future.

underpinning publications

Ezra, R. “Recycling Iconoclasm’s Waste: Some notes and speculations.” Sculpture Journal 31.3 (2022): 353-360.

Borgo, F. & Ezra, R. “The Work of Waste.” In Wastework: Early modern stories from the cutting room floor, ed. Borgo and Ezra, 6-39. Rome: Officina Libraria, 2024.

Borgo, F. & Ezra, R. “Discards by Design: Recovering Waste in the Making.” West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture 31.1 (2024): 5-25. doi.org/10.1086/735324

outputs

#1 Community workshop

Community workshop at Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA), where, in an open call, printmakers (students, amateurs, professionals) will be asked to tell the story of one material they use, tracking its lifespan from acquisition through consumption and disposal.

#2 Open-access website

Open-access website hosted on StAs server, with “object stories” published from the above workshop, documenting and animating the waste and life-cycles of printmaking materials.

#3 Community convening/hands-on workshop

Community convening/hands-on workshop at Edinburgh Printmakers where, learning from the above stories, we imagine possible futures and alternatives, trialling historical receipes that, developed in times of scarcity and pre-industrialization, may offer lessons for the creative environments of the future.

#4 Toolkit with recommendations for sustainable printrooms

Toolkit with recommendations for sustainable printrooms published on website, developed in collaboration as output from the second workshop.

#5 Educational/environmental white paper

Educational/environmental white paper written through future collaboration and as creative arts policy for Scotland net-zero 2045.