Exploring (for DS)

About the edition

This print was created by Toby Paterson and produced in DCA Print Studio as part of 2020 Editions: a portfolio of prints created to mark an extraordinary, challenging year, and to support DCA's recovery from a crisis that has gripped the entire cultural sector.

As the UK-wide lockdown that began in March 2020 drew to a close, we invited a group of artists who had participated in our programme to submit work to be developed with our team in DCA Print Studio and included in a portfolio. Some had worked with us recently; others had taken part in projects soon after we opened in 1999, but all of them gave their time and work generously in support of DCA, and we are incredibly grateful to them.

The project came with some built-in specifications – shape, size, edition number – but the remarkable diversity of the finished works eloquently reflects the range of our programme, and the possibilities of working with our Print Studio.

This print draws together a range of elements that spontaneously come to mind when I subjectively consider Dundee. During the lockdown of spring/early summer 2020 I found myself thinking my way into other places and times via aspects of my immediately accessible yet necessarily limited local environment: Such intense and extended engagement with seemingly familiar places generated new perspectives on previous experience and this small collage is an early attempt to synthesise something tangible from a dissolute time.

Elements of autobiography and affinity come into this image, but central to it is an historic publication on progressive approaches to the domestic sphere that a Dundee-based friend found discarded in the unlamented Tayside House as it was being stripped for demolition. He lives on the other side of the world now, but is someone who knew DCA well in its critical role as a cultural hub while having a deep association right back to the building’s pre-history as an illicit site of renegade cultural and social activity.

If this year has offered us anything, it might be a chance to productively explore backwards and forwards simultaneously. Toby Paterson

Other prints included in the 2020 Editions portfolio:

• Christine Borland
• Martin Boyce
• Eve Fowler
• Ilana Halperin
• Hideyuki Katsumata
• P. Staff
• Alberta Whittle
• Jane and Louise Wilson
• Clare Woods

Prints can be bought individually or as a portfolio of all 10 prints.

About Toby Paterson

Toby Paterson is a visual artist born in Glasgow in 1974. He studied at Glasgow School of Art and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, graduating from the former in 1995. Paterson won the 2002 Beck’s Futures Prize and received a Creative Scotland Award in 2006. The forms and ideas inherent in architecture inspire Paterson’s work. He has a particular interest in the post-war reinvention of cities and is intrigued by what the cultural outcome of that process has been. Living and working in Glasgow, his continuing engagement with such a perpetually changing context has informed his consideration of the spaces we inhabit. Paterson’s installations of painting and sculpture in galleries, museums and public space allude to existing sites, aestheticised approaches to the construction of architectural space and the social and political motivations responsible for creating the built environment. To complement its presentation in more traditional gallery and museum settings, his work frequently moves outside the gallery in the form of commissions in public contexts.

Own Art 
Spread the cost of buying artwork with Own Art and purchase Exploring (for DS) by Toby Paterson in 10 monthly payments of £12 (representative 0% APR). Email editions@dca.org.uk for more information or to buy.

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