Pamela Dunne’s brooding chiaroscuro landscapes and self-portraits epitomise the sombre tonalities of the drypoint process, writes Kieran Cashell
Pamela Dunne distinguished herself as an accomplished printmaker while still a final-year student at the Limerick School of Art and Design in 2006. Her early conviction that drawing bypasses the intellect and directly accesses the unconscious led her, counterintuitively, to the intaglio process, arguably the most technically demanding genre of traditional printmaking practice. Today she acknowledges that the systematic nature of intaglio appealed to her methodical instincts. Intaglio, she explains, compels the artist to slow down and concentrate, ‘to meditate on the creation of the image’. She discovered in the technique of drypoint the ‘perfect place of equilibrium’ between spontaneity and systematicity. ‘I can control every mark made on the plate. I know exactly how to make the lightest mark. There is a directness with the medium that draws you close.’
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