If print is not dead, who’s keeping it alive?

An autonomous art form

Rooted in rich crafts and traditions that studios comprehensively carry out in collaboration with the art and design world, the work of the printmaker goes largely unseen.

As I walk around London-based studio Make-Ready with founder Thomas Murphy – a print project that started in his South London garage all the way back in 2016 and has since become the world’s largest silkscreen print studio dedicated to fine-art – there are several screen prints undergoing an insanely laborious process of production, the craft of which is pretty much unparalleled at this scale. Amongst his explanations of everything from 26-layer file separations to mixing inks in-house, and the perfect conditions for developing a screen, we leaf through some hand drawn film positives for an Alex Katz print that he has been working on.

“It’s actually mental that I’m drawing them by hand,” he says. “I can draw quite well, and that’s a skill that I have, but that doesn’t matter, the print, as it stands, will have been made by the artist. But personally, for me, that’s not really the point at all. I know that we made it, and the artist knows that we made it, and the grease from the machine is still under my fingernails. I can go to bed at night knowing that we’ve done a great job.”

Far from the quiet process of reproduction that many perceive printmaking to be, the craft of the discipline has always been “an autonomous artform” in its own right, for printmakers like Joyce Gulley and Jan Dirk de Wilde, co-founders of Knust, an independent artist press based in the Netherlands. Widely regarded as one of the early pioneers for artist printmaking with the Risograph, Knust laid the foundations for the boom in this stencil printing technique back in the 80s and is still going strong, printing incredible artist books and editions with decades of expertise today.

Over the years at Knust, the studio’s prints have always stood as “interpretations that are somewhat disconnected from their originals”, shares Joyce. “In the early days when artists came just to have their catalogue printed, we said they were at the wrong address and tried to challenge them to think about making an artist book instead.” For Joyce and Jan, seeing machines like the Risograph as “perfect tools” for “specific tasks”, is a bit of a fault of the creative scene, one that ignores the real value in the place of the printmaker in letting go of specific expectations and “exploring and altering the process” – something that always “gives the most impressive results”, Joyce says.

As both designers and publishers, the team at Small Editions have managed to bridge what are usually prescribed as completely separate worlds, into a symbiotic practice. “We never want to design a book and then, afterwards, figure out how to produce it. Production is woven into the design and concept of a book from the very beginning,” Hannah shares. “I’m choosing paper at the same time as I’m playing around with layouts in InDesign; I’m deciding on a book’s binding structure at the same time as I’m deciding its type direction.”

It’s no secret that knowing how to stitch a book’s spine or having an in-depth knowledge of the materials and print methods at our disposal makes us better designers, but it's also a vocabulary that saves us time and money in the production of physical things. “When working with strict production budgets and deadlines, this knowledge has proved invaluable in our toolkit as a design studio,” shares Hannah. Despite the equilibrium they have found in a combined practice at Small Editions, this in-depth print knowledge isn’t commonplace amongst designers, and it’s only getting harder to come by. The mystery of the print world still seems to pervade, unless creatives decisively seek out their answers.

Widening margins: The growing knowledge gap

When starting out with Make-Ready, Tom quickly realised that there wasn’t just a gap in traditional craft-based knowledge in the wider creative industry but inside the print scene itself. “I realised early on that the kind of zeitgeist of print shops is that there is this huge generational gap of knowledge. When I first started, I was actually spending a lot of time with suppliers (for screens, ink, paper etc) and they have all this incredible information, this beautiful community but I wasn’t getting that from studios. I essentially started Make-Ready,” he says, “because there wasn’t anywhere that I thought I could work and really learn it all from.”

In the independent publishing scene, Hannah and Isobel have certainly seen this nescience – “not just of ‘traditional’ bookbinding and printmaking, but of print production in general”, Isobel shares. Both designers have recognised that this invaluable information on production is no longer taught in most art or graphic design programs. So, like Tom, the pair both had to learn print and production by doing it – “mistakes included”. As a result of this, a huge part of their practice is now steered to closing this gap through educational workshops and publications such as their How to Book series.

If it’s so commonplace for a lot of the greatest printmakers to be self-taught, then not only is the expert knowledge the industry holds not being acknowledged as such, it’s rarely being passed down. Although it may be easier nowadays to produce anything without loads of print expertise, Joyce from Knust believes the accessibility of techniques like the Risograph, although largely positive, “makes it, in many ways, too easy to just make ‘a pretend print’”, while the whole process, “from prepress to controlling the machine is often a complete mystery for most people, and they are no longer eager enough to dig into it”.

Education surrounding the market is certainly narrowing and with it, the value people might see in the craft. ‘Print is dying’ has become a violent sentiment in a climate where there’s a declining culture of care if a press disappears, and we have less know-how to give each time we train someone new. These struggles might be things studios always face in silence as they grit their teeth and upskill their way through the uncertainty, but this void of community and support doesn’t lead us anywhere new.

Print’s decline may well come from the next generation giving up on trying to bridge the gap, too busy with shiny new digital tools to turn to analogue print, but the trade is also at risk of dissolving “if we don’t talk to each other”, Tom shares. “If we don’t collaborate and printmakers don’t talk, hang out and share their trials and tribulations, we will lose innovation and therefore lose accessibility and lose the market.” Print’s continued evolution in a contemporary context might not just be contingent on the wider industry’s connection to printmakers and the value of their skilled labour, but on bringing down the internal feeling of guardedness that is gatekeeping the ins and outs of floating a business from the craft.

The shifting, merging and mis-registering value of print

When working in and through the language of the printed book, the aim with all of Hannah and Isobel’s work is for readers to not “look straight through the language of the book”, in order to get to its contents, but instead, to create the “moment of interpretation and decoding” that printed things so brilliantly bring about – “a pause evoked by the ‘thingness’ of the book”, shares Isobel. This sense of awe is something that Make-Ready aims to produce from everything that goes through the press. Tom likens a good print to a flame: “it should be something that you can’t look away from,” he says. “When someone looks at a piece, we want people to think ‘how on earth did they make that?’”

Even as we are seeing analogue printmaking more and more on a digital stage, it’s common knowledge that it still has the ability to hold this kind of magic and it’s something that creatives are tapping into to stand out in the virtual sphere. In fact, it’s what a lot of contemporary digital artists like Jacob Hutchinson are rooting their visuals in, as they know it imbues their work with all the soul of the analogue and ephemeral. Whole websites like “I feel so much shame” by Jackie Lui are similarly being shaped by this charm of imperfection – composed with over 700 individual prints for each digital click, the intimacy and warmth of this poem stands worlds apart from your usual URL-based experience.

Berlin based design studio DTAN turns to Risograph printing to bring its immersive digital animations to life for a similar reason. The studio works in collaboration with musicians, artists and brands, with an extensive frame-by-frame approach – making use of the happy accidents that come with the technique in order to “create a different kind of connection with viewers”, studio co-founder Julia Schimautz tells us. “These characteristics that some might call ‘imperfections’ have become part of our visual vocabulary and help our work feel distinctive in its own way.”

For DTAN, showing the human touch behind its work has separated it from a sea of sameness in design and motion work online. “While digital has taken over as the primary medium for everyday communication, we have also found that print has found a new context as something people want to own and experience physically,” shares Julia. “At book fairs, you see all the different ideas and approaches people bring to printed matter. In a world where so much of our experience is digital, physical printed objects hold a different kind of value; one that’s more about connection, craft, and tangibility rather than pure information delivery.”

There’s a funny irony in this use of print for digital display, though; some might be screaming from the rooftops that print must be seen in the flesh for it to feel truly ‘alive’. Tangible experiences of handmade things can never be replaced, no matter how visceral things might feel on screen. Yet for the large majority of people, owning a few independent zines and artist books is one thing, and the idea of buying into artist printmaking in a larger way is often completely inaccessible, let alone possible to fund the production of at a smaller press. Artist prints continue to be only available to the few.

This is something that Make-Ready’s studio model has actively tried to revise in the fine art space. Through an ongoing partnership with Avante Arte, an organisation and online art community aiming to change the way we “discover contemporary artists and buy art”, the studio is on a mission to make editions more accessible and affordable. With smaller-scale or highly technical digital print runs of artist editions, Make-Ready aims to make it possible for different kinds of collectors to be able to purchase the artist work that they produce. “I think people and businesses really need to understand that to be accessible, you have to make things accessible, and you have to really think about your pricing in that way,” shares Tom. “You are making things inaccessible if you just release editions of 25, for 30,000 quid; they’re beautiful, don’t get me wrong, but if people aren’t buying them, that’s how the industry dies, you know.”

The next generation of printmaking

The last few years have seen one of the biggest economic downturns in the arts in history, not just in the world of print but across the creative industry in the UK and further afield. With AI significantly swallowing entry level roles to “automated tooling, shrinking budgets and organisational shifts that prioritise speed over mentorship”, as Carly Ayres has framed it, cutbacks have not only made projects moving into print feel evermore unattainable, they have obstructed the path for a new generation of printmakers to enter, and be supported by smaller studios. With a loss of starter-level skillsharing, there is arguably far less emphasis on the slow intentional skills that go into the creative process now and much more on quick results – maybe that’s where print is falling through the cracks. It’s a craft that celebrates the making just as much as the thing that’s made. Or in Julia’s words it “invites people to pause and appreciate the process alongside results”.

In his exploration of the future of the independent magazine scene, in The Real Death of Print, Steve Watson posed the central idea that this “self-fulfilling prophecy” of print’s decline “shapes and often limits the ambitions of magazine makers”. As printmakers and publishers, this could certainly be the case – constantly hearing that you’re on a sinking ship isn’t something that is traditionally conducive to creativity, but that’s not what I’ve seen from the people and the presses, who, in my eyes, are truly keeping the art alive.

There are studios producing boundary-pushing work despite this narrative of impending doom: I have never seen an understanding of colour layering quite so close to the sensitivity of a painter than in Knust’s work, and Make-Ready is producing impressions on paper that feel somewhat unfathomable, almost photographic, and are continuously stretching screenprinting to new standards. DTAN is pioneering a new space for the analogue art in the digital and Small Editions is designing and making books with a care and attention that’s pushing the limits of forms the vessels can take. There has certainly been no death of creativity and innovation in artist printing; the current climate is the thing that’s putting pressure on the industry to be more financially viable or confidently commercial than ever before.