Pictures: Nigel Clements
By Casey Neill
UPWEY artist Jenny Mai Hall has captured the ordinary in an extraordinary way.
Her exhibition Going Down Town is now on display at Burrinja, showcasing the isolation people feel walking through Melbourne’s busy streets.
“You’re walking in the crowd and your identity’s sort of part of that crowd rather than individual,” she said.
Ms Hall hopes people will take from the prints a sense of place.
“People will recognise the places and think about when they’ve stood in that same place and felt those feelings,” she said.
The collection features 13 framed prints and a huge carved printing block.
“Which gives people an idea of the process of the other prints,” Ms Hall said.
“A lot of people think it’s computer generated. They don’t realise it’s all done by hand.”
The block is 3.2 metres wide, 1.8m high and took four months to create.
“And it was pretty much six days a week,” Ms Hall said. She begins with a digital photograph, manipulates it using a computer and transfers it onto fibreboard.
Ms Hall painstakingly carves out part of the image with pen-sized tools and uses ink and a manual press to produce a print.
She then adds more detail and prints again, repeating the process many times. The technique is called reduction printing.
The exhibition also includes three lino prints and three photolithography pieces, which are made by projecting images onto aluminium plates with UV light and using acid to create an etching.
Together the prints represent a year’s work. Some have been exhibited internationally and interstate as well as in galleries throughout Melbourne.
Going Down Town is on display at Burrinja Café Gallery, 351 Glenfern Road, Upwey, until 22 August.
Ms Hall also has a collection of abstract paintings on display at Oscar’s Alehouse in Belgrave over the next few months.
