About the publication
We are delighted to publish a new book to accompany Soft Impressions, a cross-generational group exhibition at DCA, bringing together the work of Helen Cammock, Ingrid Pollard and Camara Taylor. The title is drawn from printmaking terminology, where a work lifted from the printing plate is called an impression; the same term can be used to denote the application of pressure in creating prints.
The exhibition at DCA focuses on the artists’ shared engagement with, and considered approach to, printmaking as a medium. Their works in print are contextualised alongside installation, moving image, textiles and a mural. A common thread in each artist’s work is an exploration of identity and rethinking historical narratives or figures through poetic actions. Cammock and Pollard have both undertaken production residencies in DCA Print Studio for the exhibition.
This publication brings together a constellation of voices alongside full colour images of the exhibition and a preface by curator Tiffany Boyle.
In a newly commissioned text by art historian and writer Professor Susannah Thompson, the seminal Caribbean writer Sam Selvon’s time in Dundee and his published works provide a kind of timeline, a backbone, to key moments and happenings referenced in the works of Pollard, Cammock and Taylor.
This is followed by an in-conversation between the three artists which took place during the exhibition’s opening preview; speaking to printmaking methods, the application of pressure, research processes in both formal archives and the public domain, and cross-generational conversations.
| Date | March 2025 |
| Edition of | 500 |
| Design | Valerie Norris |
| ISBN | 978-1-8382711-7-6 |
| Dimensions | 18.8 x 24.6 x 0.5cm |
| Pages | 72pp |
About the Artists
Helen Cammock was born in Staffordshire, and is now based between London and Wales. She works across film, photography, print, text, song and performance examining mainstream historical and contemporary narratives about Blackness, womanhood, oppression and resistance, wealth and power, poverty and vulnerability. She is represented by Kate MacGarry, London.
Professor Ingrid Pollard MBE is a photographer, media artist and researcher. She was born in Georgetown, Guyana, and moved to London as a child with her family. She is a graduate of the London College of Printing and Derby University, and was awarded her doctorate by the University of Westminster in 2016. Pollard has developed a practice concerned with representation, history and landscape with reference to race, difference and the materiality of lens-based media.
Camara Taylor is an artist and programmer who lives in Glasgow. They work with their various selves, collaborators and organisations to produce still and moving images, texts and other things that might act as moments of stasis amidst sprawling research. Their projects tend towards the accumulation and dissolution of language, (Black) presence and structures.
About the Writer
Susannah Thompson is an art historian, writer and critic from Newcastle upon Tyne, based in Glasgow. She is Professor of Fine Art at Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University.
