Early Ruined Score study
Explore Seher Shah’s printmaking practice through her recent work Ruined Score and Argument from Silence, currently on view as part of her solo exhibition.
(excerpt)
“I have been drawn to the ways that the fragmented and incomplete line falls between a desire to communicate and the inability to do so. It is difficult to convey what drawing and mark-making can provoke over time but it leaves a trace of a language built through intuitive, controlled and visceral marks. The Ruined Score etchings speaks to this hermetic language in between architectural abstraction and music notations, but communicates neither in its entirety. The process of intaglio printmaking can preserve the scratches and acid-bitten marks of the etching needle, to the ways in which the hand moves over the copper-plate whilst covered in wax ground. The etched line has extended the ways in which I think about drawing and abstraction through marks that retain depth and these traces of time. The Ruined Score portfolio is a continuation of a long-term relationship with the Glasgow Print Studio in the study of intaglio printmaking under the guidance of Master Printmaker Stuart Duffin.”
“Argument from Silence is a portfolio of ten polymer photogravure prints exploring the ruptures and underlying violence in relationships between object, history, and architecture. The work explores the Gandhara sculpture from the Government Museum and Art Gallery in Chandigarh built in 1967, by working with the photographic image as a site for drawing interventions and disturbances. Gandhara, an ancient region located in present-day Afghanistan and Pakistan was transformed by the diverse, shared and accumulated knowledge of Persian, Syrian, Greek and Indian cultures. I wanted to engage with this collection as I was drawn to the relationships between object and site, and to the complex legacy of the Gandhara works."