Etchings

Copper Plate Etchings. 2025

Hard ground and aquatint

Copper Plate Etchings. 2025

Hard ground, aquatint and blind embossing

My final piece explores distaste within the traditional porn industry. I sourced an image taken from an old Penthouse Australia magazine and reimagined it in an Art Nouveau-esque way. Within the Art Nouveau scene, the female figure is often depicted in a sensual manner, not oversexualized or graphic. They have an essence of appreciation rather than commercialisation of the female figure like porn. My exploration of wordplay begun with listing all the words and phrases I found disturbing within the same magazine. I experimented with blind embossing to create a conceptual relation to the image. The text reads “I MAY NOT BE MUCH TO LOOK AT, BUT MY FOREPLAY IS DYNAMITE”, an absurd comment to have situated beneath a photograph of a model, chosen for her beauty. This of course was not written by her, and so I used a times roman font, to represent traditional typewriter text to highlight its frivolous impersonal nature. The technique of blind embossing aimed to explore the dynamic of an absurd oversexualized comment written by a man (presumably) in an office playing off that it was written by this woman. It also simply represents the nature of the traditional porn industry simply targeted towards cis gendered heterosexual men. There was a lot of trial and error involved in the blind embossing, I tried dry point, Lino and then concluded on laser cut plywood, which left the cleanest and most eligible mark. I used both hardground etched and aquatint techniques on my copper plate to create depth and shadow. The dark aquatint on the face of the model represents the shadow and facelessness of the porn industry.