Presentation

About: Darren is currently employed as Art and Design lecturer who specializes in the field of printmaking and interdisciplinary practice at Southern Cross University, Lismore NSW. As an HDR candidate at Griffith University, Darren has established and maintained an exemplary print practice recognised at both national and international levels within the field of printmaking.

Darren’s work has been included in significant survey shows in Europe, Asia, and Australia with work in numerous national and international collections. Darren has also been a recipient of international awards including the London Print Studio Prize and the Printmaking Today Prize (UK).

Between the Folds: The Dialectics of Aura and Altered Narrative in Reproductive Practice

Darren Bryant (SCU)

Abstract: This presentation aims to share insights into my current HDR project and initiate discussions that lie in the field of the merging old and new print technologies. The project builds on existing knowledge and identifies how dialectical debates surrounding aura and reproductive practices continue to be of influence. This paper also presents the idea that objects from my childhood can also arouse an experience of aura. By utilising my own collection of objects as a point of unpacking my past, I turn to printmaking to examine how an auratic encounter with them can be seen and developed into a series of prints and artists’ books: A process enabling me to re-examine questions on social norms, connected to accepted or expected expressions of identity.

I will discuss how I have adopted what Georges Didi-Huberman calls ‘opposing dialectical tension’ to create a sense of the ‘auratic’ experience. By examining multiplicity within paper folding and print reproduction, I aim to encounter my own ‘auratic trace’ associated with the opposing tensions as ever-present companions of familiar/unfamiliar, presence/absence, original/copy, similarity, and difference. Recent altered books titled Fold Vol. 1 (2018), and Fold Vol.2 (2020) will be discussed as case studies associated with haptic printed overlays, and stacked sequential arrangements of images as boxed paper folds: A research project that holds outcomes in the interplay between identity, memory, and nostalgia, connected to aura and reproduction. 

Didi-Huberman, Georges, 2005. “The Supposition of the Aura: The Now, The Then and Modernity”, In Walter Benjamin and History, edited by Andrew E. Benjamin and translated by Jane Marie Todd, Continuum, New York. 3-18.