Thinking through Printing: Relief, Impression, and the Medieval

Abstract

Anthropologist Tim Ingold has influentially advocated for a means of thinking that mirrors that of a craftsman or artist. For Ingold, this means adopting a mode of thinking that responds to, and moves with, the materials we work with. As a medievalist who makes linocut prints, I am curious about how my academic and crafting experiences interact, and how my printmaking might function, in Ingold’s words, as an “art of inquiry.” This article will consider two crafting processes required to make a linocut—carving the block to create a relief, and the creation of an impression—and will explore how these crafting processes have encouraged me to think about our creation of the medieval now. To do so, I will reflect on my experience making a lino print, entitled “Salt-in-the-Wound,” to accompany Laura Varnam’s poem “The Name of the Father,” which gives a voice to Grendel’s Mother (one of the three major antagonists in the Old English poem Beowulf ).