DUNDEE.- Dundee Contemporary Arts is presenting the cross-generational group exhibition by Helen Cammock, Ingrid Pollard and Camara Taylor: Soft Impressions. It runs from Saturday 7 December 2024 – Sunday 23 March 2025.

This major exhibition, spanning both gallery spaces at DCA, includes new and existing print work from the early 2000s to present day. Soft Impressions focuses on the artists’ shared engagement with and strategic use of the medium of printmaking, contextualised alongside works in installation, moving image, textiles and a painted mural.

The exhibition draws its title from printmaking, where each work pulled from a printing plate is called an impression - the same term can be used to denote the application of pressure in creating prints. Soft Impressions engages with printmaking’s role in the historic distribution of ideas about race and depictions of otherness, and its use as a tool for both political activism and propaganda.

Collectively, the three artists reclaim printmaking - their integration of its possibilities into their practice is loaded with gestures, omissions, and images made opaque. The impressions made – in print, on paper – have a softness which is equally powerful. In Camara Taylor’s digital print Untitled (familiar document), an image of family members in the home is printed with the black ink removed from the toner cartridge. In Ingrid Pollard’s There Was Much Interruption, the repeat pattern of the wallpaper is no longer a decorative device, instead providing a kind of visual camouflage for those depicted, drawn from photographs taken by the artist in Sacy, Lancashire and Ghana. 

In Pollard’s suite of blind embossings, Seventeen of Sixty-Eight, which were made without ink – historic racist insignia collected from pubs across the UK is impressed into white paper. The audience is drawn into close range of the work to decipher the image, the shock of the imagery made even more forceful.  

New work produced in DCA Print Studio by Helen Cammock includes a new suite of works responding to the life and work of Scottish mill worker and activist Mary Brooksbank. A second body of work replicates in a montage the details and effects of various historical print media of portraits of African-American abolitionist and orator Frederick Douglass, who gave speeches in Dundee and neighbouring towns in the 1840s, advocating against the Free Church of Scotland’s investment in the plantations of the Americas.

A common theme in each artist’s work is an exploration of identity and rethinking historical narratives or figures through poetic actions. A number of works across the exhibition are underpinned by sustained research in archives and collections, for example Helen Cammock’s engagement with the unpublished writing of Brooksbank, found in the University of Dundee’s archives, and Camara Taylor’s ongoing research into the life and work of African-American artist Robert S Duncanson, who spent time in Scotland in the 1870s during the Anti-abolitionist movement painting a number of his most well-known works. 

New commissions in print have been created during 2024 production residencies in DCA Print Studio by Helen Cammock and Ingrid Pollard and will be displayed across the galleries.

Ingrid Pollard will also produce a new print edition, which will be available for sale in DCA shop upon its release. A series of talks and events will accompany the exhibition, with a publication forthcoming in 2025.

Tiffany Boyle, DCA Head of Exhibitions said:  The chance to reflect and place emphasis on Helen, Ingrid and Camara's use of printmaking has been a very special opportunity, allowing us to bring existing, rarely-exhibited and key works from their respective practices into DCA Galleries. To be able to show these three artists at a range of stages in their careers - each engaging with local archives, collections and histories - is really thrilling and I can’t wait to share their work, and the connections between it, with our audiences.  

Helen Cammock, said: The work I have made for the exhibition centres around Dundee’s jute and linen mills, which marks the third instance for me of engaging with mills as a site of power, labour, inequality and capital. In my visit to see the papers of mill worker and activist Mary Brooksbank (1897 – 1978) in the University of Dundee archives, I was immediately struck by her unpublished poems, hand-written in a notebook: they had such fight and fervour to them. One poem in particular titled ‘Courage’ has a striking contemporary pertinence.

Of the existing works coming into the show, ‘Shouting in Whispers’ has only been shown once in a gallery context, and here enters into dialogue with my new works responding to Brooksbank. Other existing works include the fabric banner ‘I Decided I Want to Walk’ , which in asking questions of labour and capital invites us to think of making choices not only for ourselves but also the needs and rights of others. In my initial walks around Dundee, I was struck by the colours I absorbed – greens, greys, reds and browns – which I know from now being based in north-Wales, but wouldn’t find in London or Brighton (where I’ve spent much of my life) in the same way. On those walks, tracing the route of Dundee’s Black History Walking Tour, I saw the city with the eyes of someone not of this place; I often feel a belonging to this sense of unbelonging, which I now sit in with purpose.

Ingrid Pollard, said: Being part of a cross-generational show such as ‘Soft Impressions’ is really significant; as a photographer, it’s the first time my work in printmaking (from etching to screenprint and emboss) is under focus. In my early career, much of my interaction with printmaking was in community organising, facilitating other’s access to making and the production facilities of Lenthall Road Workshop Collective. Here at DCA, it has been the reverse – working closely with the technicians to realise my ideas, across letterpress in particular. So much of the work in ‘Soft Impressions’ responds to the idea of pressure – in printmaking a key action in the creation of the work itself, on the audience in the galleries to move close to the work in order to be able to see it, or in terms of research, through key themes such as geology and the formation of the landscape over millennia. 

 The production of Ingrid Pollard’s work, There was much interruption, was realised by ArtLab, UCLAN. 

Helen Cammock was born in 1970 in Staffordshire. Film, photography, print, text, song and performance examine mainstream historical and contemporary narratives about Blackness, womanhood, oppression and resistance, wealth and power, poverty and vulnerability, throughout her practice. Her works often cut across time and geography, layering multiple voices as she investigates the cyclical nature of histories in her visual and aural assemblages. 

She has exhibited and performed worldwide with recent solo shows with institutions including Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought, New Orleans and Art + Practice, Los Angeles (2023); Amant, Brooklyn, USA (2023); Oakville Galleries, Ontario, Canada (2023); Kestner Gesellshaft, Hannover, Germany (2022); The Photographer’s Gallery, London (2021); STUK Art Centre, Leuven, Belgium (2021); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2019); Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy (2019); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland (2019) and VOID, Derry, Northern Ireland (2018).  

In 2023, Cammock received a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists. In 2019, she was the joint recipient of The Turner Prize and in 2017, Cammock won the Max Mara Art Prize for Women. In May 2024, Cammock’s public art commission On WindTides (2024) launched on The Line, London.  She is currently based between Wales and London. 

Prof. Ingrid Pollard MBE is a photographer, media artist and researcher. She was born in 1953 in Georgetown, Guyana, and moved to London as a child with her family. She was drawn into the political liberation movements of the late 1980s and early 1990s, working with a community-based screen printing and photographic workshop and supplying images to magazines such as Spare Rib. 

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. 

Her work is included in numerous collections including the UK Arts Council and the Victoria & Albert Museum. In 2018, she was the inaugural Stuart Hall Associate Fellow at the University of Sussex, in 2019 she received both the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award and BALTIC Artists Award. She was recently nominated for the Turner Prize in 2022, and is the 2024 Hasselblad Award Laureate. She currently lives and works in Northumberland, Northeast England.  

Camara Taylor is an artist and curator, based in Glasgow. They were previously a committee member at Transmission Gallery, Glasgow (2016-2018) and a participant in Constellations, an artist working group programme conceived by UP Projects and Flat Time House.  Their work is held in the collection of Glasgow Museums, and their artist films have been screened venues across the UK and internationally, including The Glasgow School of Art, Coventry Art Space, the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas and Galerie de l'UQAM, Montréal. Solo exhibitions include [mouthfeel] at Tramway as part of Glasgow International 2024; backwash at collective, Edinburgh, 2022; and A RANT! A REEL! at Cubitt, London, 2021.