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The archipelago is a protected landmass, which meant Bové and the other artists and scientists were not allowed to take anything off the land as souvenirs, nor leave anything behind as remnants of their presence. Therefore, Bové created 3D-printed brooches that could temporarily capture various rocks and ice chunks found on the archipelago.

Animated by the intricate glacial till patterns that he was documenting, Bové used his drawings to create etchings on small copper plates. Many of the pieces of glacial till he documented in his sketchbook and camera rolls were also used later as inspirations for his etchings after he returned home.

The etchings created from Bové’s drawings and photos while traveling not only act as a means of documentation of the Arctic Circle expedition, but also become tangible remnants of a memory and experience. “The process I use is electrolytic etching in copper,” says Bové. “I paint my drawing on using an oil-based resist, then scratch away at the resist to create the line width and detail I want before etching the image into the metal. The printing press allows me to use heavier paper and create a more traditional, intaglio, look.”

Rather than framing the small, intimate prints from his etchings in traditional frames to solely hang on the wall, Bové turned the prints into jewelry by 3D-printing frames with an integrated magnetic pin back that could be worn on the body. In a sense, they mimic the 3D-printed brooches he made while sailing around the Arctic. As another homage to the 3D printer he used during his residency, the prints themselves, while etched on copper plates, were either hand printed or printed on a printing press that Bové 3D-printed from open-source specs he found online.

By continuing to use 3D-printing as a process to physically print the etched plates and then 3D-print the frames/mechanisms to capture the etchings he created when back in his personal studio, Bové adds to the immensely layered meanings behind a body of work that combines printmaking, 3D-printing, and jewelry.

Drawing as a translation of ideas is also a motivational factor in the work of Lynn Batchelder. Provoked by engaging drawing as a way of “thinking, reflecting, exploring, and inventing,” Batchelder melds line and surface in her work through engraving on metal to printing on paper. While Batchelder says she’s not a formally trained printmaker, her works exemplify the controlled hand of a seasoned engraver in the works she produces.

With access to state-of-the-art print studios at locations such as Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Women’s Studio Workshop, and the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, Batchelder has had the opportunity to intermittently dedicate her focus on mastering printmaking techniques such as engraving in her work.

Rich with textures created from silver etching and hand engraving, her jewelry objects visibly pay homage to the matrix plates used historically in intaglio. While Batchelder’s jewelry is not used as the direct printing matrices, the correlation between the physical objects and her separate body of prints is apparent through the gestural quality of her mark-making.

“Recognizing the crossover between tools and techniques used in both print and in metal, intaglio felt like a seamless extension of my work. The logic that an object can appear drawn, become a drawing, or that a drawing or print can seem tactile or conjure physical sensations, is fascinating,” says Batchelder.

A recent 2020 MFA graduate and former student of Batchelder’s at SUNY New Paltz, Jamie Scherzer, also found printmaking as a means of integrating the repetitive processes of metalsmithing with the similarly repetitive process of two-dimensional mark making. Says Scherzer:
 

My second semester at New Paltz I took a paper-making class, which is taught through the printmaking department. I ended up embedding metal into paper and oxidizing the metal and got pulled into the paper/printmaking world. Through the printmaking department there was an opportunity to apply to a printmaking residency in Belgium at Frans Masereel Centrum, which I got accepted to based on my past work and proposal of approaching print from a metalsmith perspective. That was October 2019, so I spent the semester leading up to then exploring the repetitive process I’d been investigating in metal and approaching the metal as a canvas, challenging myself to create dimension on this two-dimensional surface that would in turn create something palpable on the page.

In Scherzer’s work, the plate used for printing is not only treated as a means to print, but is also transformed into an object of display. The artifacts left from inking and printing, made of either silver or copper, were surprising remnants that Scherzer utilized. They became jewelry objects or were shown in conjunction with the prints pulled from them. Welcoming the serendipitous nature of the flattened metal forms after printing, Scherzer states:
 

I was printing with both copper and silver “plates,” using them as a tool to create imagery, and loved the play between the two mediums and how they would often print in ways not expected and bring out minute details and imperfections from the metal that may have otherwise not been seen. After printmaking I would still have this interesting metal plate which I could either keep as an artifact or turn into jewelry.

Scherzer fabricated necklaces from the plates used in Traces 1 and 2, for example, and turned plates into Empty Box and Release. As three-dimensional outputs of the matrices are warped and deformed through the printing process, the ink gets embedded in the crevices of the metal surface, much like in Batchelder’s work, bringing depth to the spaces created between the positive lines and spots, and the negative spaces of the plates.

Elevating the printing matrix as more than just a means to an end is also inherent in the works of Jaydan Moore. The matrix of donated silver platters, in this case, is repurposed through printing and then repurposed again into vast sculptural objects that tell stories steeped in history.

Moore, who grew up in Northern California, had been integrating print into his artistic process since his early childhood. As part of his family’s tombstone and marker business, Moore would take rubbings of grave markers. “I loved going out with the carbon paper, laying it down on the granite, and rubbing the surface to reveal the information on top. This process congealed in my mind the notion that we are affected by places and objects that surround us,” says Moore. This process of duplicating information and forms translated into Moore’s work as an adult.

With ink embedded into the incised scratches from natural wear of the platters to the unique surface idiosyncrasies highlighted through the printing process, Moore’s platter prints, like Batchelder’s engravings, show the tiniest of details in the most intimate way. The prints become a permanent documentation that is not mediated in the way a photo would be. Rather, their direct impressions offer the viewer a closer connection to the original object. They become tangible documentations of the original.

The concept of mass production took off in the early 1900s, and the mass production of serving platters has a neat equivalency with the ability printmakers have to take multiple prints from a single printing plate. Both processes build on having an original pattern to pull from, despite the difference in manifestations.

Much as the unique gestural qualities of each printmaker’s hand are documented in the final print, the mass-produced platters that Moore integrates into his work each have unique qualities of ownership imbedded into the metal surfaces through mars, scratches, and dings. The notion that an object undergoes a journey of evolution is similar to Bové’s Glacial Till works, with their stones and the resulting prints from sketches of those stones acting as the documentation of their travels. In Moore’s case, the object and the resulting documentation manifest in his donation project. The printing process offers a means of giving back to his patrons while also cataloguing the platters before integrating them into his sculptural objects.

“I make only two copies; one for the owner of the platter, and one for my archives. This process lets me learn more about the families who lived with these objects and the reasons they are ready to let go of them,” says Moore. “Seeing how the communal idea of what a specific object means to our society and how the individual's connection to these objects changes that ideal has always excited me. How the value of our objects ebbs and flows as we imbue value and meaning onto them harkens back to the tombstones I used to walk through when I was a child.”

The limited production of Moore’s prints, meanwhile, runs counter to the concept of mass production, and is a seductive component in his process. With the printing process, Moore could pull multiple, if not hundreds, of prints from a single platter. The choice to pull only two prints, one for the family who donated, and one for himself, speaks to Moore’s restraint and the resulting rarity of the “object” created. It creates an intimate shared moment between patron and artist, platter and print.

The connectivity between material and paper, from three-dimensional to two-dimensional, becomes blurred through the three-dimensional nature of printmaking. There is a physicality that speaks to the process. Perhaps it’s the physicality of printing that is so alluring to metalsmiths: the ability to physically alter a plate and see the changes of the surface documented on paper. The plates or matrices respond to the ink, and in return the paper responds through the embossed impressions and tonal depth left on its surface long after printing.

[1] Material Fiction and Capturing a Moment.