Aquatints
Initiated during her PhD at Loughborough University, Assunta Ruocco’s Aquatints emerged from a sustained, material engagement with the printmaking workshop and its equipment, especially the aquatint box and the hydraulic Beever press, facilitated by printmaking tutor Pete Dobson. Working with 11 zinc plates prepared using randomly dropped varnish and aquatint resin, she developed a method of layering translucent colours through repeated inking and printing, creating compositions that are at once systematic and open-ended. The use of water-saturated paper and the top-down pressure of the Beever press allowed for accurate registration without technical alignment aids, enabling more than 150 successive impressions without misalignment.
The project exemplifies Ruocco’s interest in co-working with things: not only with plates, inks, and paper, but also with the affordances and constraints of a specific furnished space. By printing on both sides of the paper and suspending the prints in transparent frames, Aquatints also plays with visibility, seriality, and the instability of aesthetic decisions, problematising the works' potential as commodities while inviting viewers into an unfolding process rather than a closed object.
Aquatints, 11 double-sided aquatint etching on Fabriano Rosaspina paper, 2013
Aquatints, 11 double-sided aquatint etching on Fabriano Rosaspina paper, 2014
Aquatints, 11 double-sided aquatint etching on Fabriano Rosaspina paper, 2015