The Ultimate Sacrifice

Craig Coulthard

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About the edition

Edinburgh-based artist Craig Couthard describes his work for the DCA Thomson exhibition as an attempt to balance romanticism and pragmatism - both in depictions and descriptions of military events and emotions, and in the expressions and execution inherent in commercial art. Coulthard was an avid reader of DC Thomson’s Commando comics and created a series of drawings inspired by these for the exhibition as well as working with DCA Print Studio on the Risograph printer to produce this very affordable limited edition Riso print for wider dissemination. In the artist’s words:

For the last year or so I have been making a lot of t-shirt ink drawings…They all have a slogan of some sort, with a different pattern and background area in each drawing. The t-shirts’ texts are usually phrases I've overheard, or read, which grab my interest. Sometimes they are things that seem to be over-used, quickly become clichés, or may have lost meaning over time. This particular phrase ‘The Ultimate Sacrifice’ seems to be used almost exclusively when talking of military service personnel who have died in service - a catchphrase for newspapers, politicians and media in general. There's a quasi-religious element to the phrase, making connections between Christ and military personnel, heroism etc. For that reason, it made its way onto a t-shirt... the drawings are about the ease with which words and meanings can be hijacked or manipulated." Craig Coulthard

Year 2016
Edition of 50
Media Two colour Risograph on Cyclus offset 115gsm paper
Dimensions 42 x 29.5cm
Signature Signed, numbered, titled and dated by artist on verso

About Craig Coulthard

Coulthard graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 2002, and with a Masters in 2006. He has exhibited widely, including a new commission for Edinburgh Art Festival in 2014; Forest Pitchfor the London 2012 Festival; the Athens Biennial, the Royal Scottish Academy and Bloomberg New Contemporaries.

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