Marian Crawford
Marian Crawford
(with contribution from Angela Brennan)
Haunts hantise haunting 2021
relief print and letterpress; artist book; edition 7/15
Courtesy of the artist
Angela Brennan is represented by Niagara Galleries, Melbourne
Artist statement:
Drawing on shapes that echo across centuries—the vase or amphora, and the contemporary decorative patterns of everyday curtain fabrics—the artist book Haunts hantise haunting translates everyday materials to reconfigure the familiar.
These images are studio experiments, relief prints made with found furnishing fabrics. Gluing a piece of fabric to a piece of cardboard, inking it up and printing it transformed a mundane curtain fabric into an abstract pattern, something new and not-so-easily-explained. Lifting these prints from the matrix after running them through a press revealed a surprise that engendered optimism and a sense of another life.
The book’s letterpress printed texts read: ‘What is such an obsession? It is something or someone that always comes back, survives everything, reappears at intervals, and expresses a truth concerning an original state of affairs. It is something or someone that one cannot forget, and yet is impossible to recognize clearly.’1
1. Georges Didi-Huberman The Surviving Image, Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms, Aby Warburg’s History of Art, The University of Pennsylvania Press, Pennsylvania, 2017, p. 13 (originally published in French in 2002)