Mr Darren Bryant

This presentation aims to share insights into my ongoing artist's book practice and initiate discussions on how I continue to merge old and new print technologies to interrogate ideas surrounding 'the aura of the original'. This presentation highlights individual studio-based research interests in how artists' books can control how we read them. The formal structure of a book (physical or virtual) can control how we handle it and interact with its content, open and closed. I will discuss how I have adopted what Susan Stewart (1993), in her book titled 'On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection', analyses how everyday objects can be narrated to realise the world around us. Stewart explores the tension between 'here' and 'not here,' 'now' and 'then,' observing that when objects are removed from their origin and time frame, they can be defined as incomplete, generating a sense of desire and, in the case of a print copy, trigger a longing for the original. (Stewart,1993, p. 136). Recent books titled, 'The Time Travellers Manual (now and then), and ‘Trace’ (2025), will be focused on to provide evidence of how research in this project has moved away from a sense of the photograph as a container for holding a specific impression, or reliable document. This presentation will discuss how images and objects are never seen as a pure impression but are layered into the chemistry of the bookmaking process and printmaking studio, where the miniature becomes gigantic.

Bryant discusses the dialectics of aura and altered narrative in reproductive practice. He states that he has been working within the field of printmaking and artists' books for many years. The last 30-40 years have seen a wonderful array of these practices expanding across Australia. Printmaking is something that constantly entices him into the studio to experiment with process and making. He shares insights into his current studio research and to initiate discussion around contemporary manifestations of printmaking and the merging of old and new print technologies.

This presentation aims to share insights into my current HDR project and initiate discussions that lie in the field of the merging old and new print technologies. The project builds on existing knowledge and identifies how dialectical debates surrounding aura and reproductive practices continue to be of influence. This paper also presents the idea that objects from my childhood can also arouse an experience of aura. By utilising my own collection of objects as a point of unpacking my past, I turn to printmaking to examine how an auratic encounter with them can be seen and developed into a series of prints and artists’ books: A process enabling me to re-examine questions on social norms, connected to accepted or expected expressions of identity.

I will discuss how I have adopted what Georges Didi-Huberman calls ‘opposing dialectical tension’ to create a sense of the ‘auratic’ experience. By examining multiplicity within paper folding and print reproduction, I aim to encounter my own ‘auratic trace’ associated with the opposing tensions as ever-present companions of familiar/unfamiliar, presence/absence, original/copy, similarity, and difference. Recent altered books titled Fold Vol. 1 (2018), and Fold Vol.2 (2020) will be discussed as case studies associated with haptic printed overlays, and stacked sequential arrangements of images as boxed paper folds: A research project that holds outcomes in the interplay between identity, memory, and nostalgia, connected to aura and reproduction.

Didi-Huberman, Georges, 2005. “The Supposition of the Aura: The Now, The Then and Modernity”, In Walter Benjamin and History, edited by Andrew E. Benjamin and translated by Jane Marie Todd, Continuum, New York. 3-18.