15/01/26 - Soil Printing

19th December 2025

Acts of Practice: Soil, Screens & Prints

As part of my practice (and perhaps more broadly, my role as an artist), I have been thinking carefully about output and how acts of practice can be utilised to make work that meaningfully translates what this research is concerned with. After all, the aim of the PhD is to discover something new, and within a practice-based framework, making work becomes a way of contributing new knowledge through unique artistic outputs. Ideas, for me, are always in development. As I sit here writing at my desk, directly in front of me on the wall are several sheets of A4 paper blu-tacked in place, six ideas drawn out, six plans to initiate, six directions to make and explore across the first part of the year. These will, I hope, form a final collective of work that brings this PhD into focus.

Before diving into those six ideas, however, I wanted to return briefly to the ‘offcuts’, the ideas that did not quite make the cut. Not to draw conclusions from them, but to listen to them, to spend a little time exploring whether anything might still surface. This blog post sits within that space. It reflects on an idea that has continued to niggle at me, one that resurfaced while teaching and which I felt could potentially be folded back into my research output.

The idea itself is not new. A year or two ago I began thinking about maps, specifically, maps of the landscapes I have walked and explored. At that time, I experimented with creating soil maps using cyanotype processes, mixing soil solutions with potassium citrate and ferric ammonium. While the process worked to a degree, the resulting images lacked the clarity and legibility I was hoping for. As a result, I placed this alternative photographic process to one side, with the intention of returning to it at a later date.

That return came unexpectedly while teaching. During a screen-printing workshop in the textiles and surface printing room, where I had taken a group of my students, my interest in mapping resurfaced. It struck me that screen printing might offer a different way of working with soil, one that could retain clarity while still allowing the material to speak.

It must have been nineteen or twenty years since I last made a screen print, roughly the same age as the students encountering the process for the first time. One of the benefits of working within an educational environment is access to materials, facilities, and, importantly, to knowledgeable colleagues. I spoke with Amber, a brilliant textiles and surface designer, and talked through the idea of using my soil solutions as the printing medium itself, pushing them through a screen to create an image. She confirmed that this was entirely possible, provided the solution was well filtered, free from clumps, grit, stone, bark or other debris that would block the fine mesh of the screen. She also noted that a heavy, darker soil would be necessary to achieve a strong visual outcome. This was encouraging to hear, and we arranged a time for me to test the idea further.

Aside from the method and act of practice, the concept was to consider the landscapes I walk within, and how those landscapes might be translated through and from the soil itself. This was not intended as an abstract photographic approach, but instead as a clearer visual register. The maps of the landscapes I had walked would be sharp, flat and legible, with the imprint of a soil-based solution applied to A1 cartridge paper. As this was an exploratory test, cartridge paper was used as a provisional surface. Each landscape map would be represented by soil unearthed from its corresponding location, mixed into a solution and used directly to produce the screen print image. The idea was simple, this soil is this landscape, it is its quality, colour and visual presence emerging from what is unearthed from the site.

This work asks how soil can operate simultaneously as material and index, translating a walked landscape into a legible yet non-representational image that carries site-specific knowledge. Rather than encountering landscape as a visual scene to be depicted, the work proposes landscape as a material trace, where soil functions as both image-maker and evidence of place. In this sense, the prints do not function as maps of a walk; instead, they allow the walked soil to map itself. The soil is not illustrative or symbolic as such, but instead operates as a material index, registering the physical, macro and organic qualities of each site through its transfer onto the surface. What emerges is a form of mapping found from contact, unearthing and translation, where landscape is revealed through the soil’s situated presence rather than through representational depiction.

Putting this into practice, the question then became how to make these screen prints. I selected Danby Moor as the site to visualise as soil maps. I have spent a considerable amount of time walking within the North Yorkshire Moors, and Danby in particular over the course of 2025. I therefore utilised soil solutions already unearthed during previous walks, cross-referencing soil records against specific location points within the landscape.

Before printing could begin, I sent three aerial topographic maps of Danby Moor to Amber, who enlarged them to A1 scale and pieced them together to create three separate screens. I was genuinely impressed by the screens themselves; the precision of the imagery, finely stretched within aluminium frames, felt almost like finished works in their own right. With the screens prepared, Amber explained that each soil solution would need to be mixed with a printing medium. Having worked with mediums before, I understood their role in allowing a material to adhere to a surface in a way similar to paint. Mixing the soil solutions with the medium was a straightforward process, resulting in a thick, rich substance that was almost unrecognisable as soil, resembling a dark, chocolate-coloured acrylic paint.

With the soil printing solution prepared, Amber reintroduced me to the screen-printing process. A sheet of cartridge paper was placed on a large flat surface, with the screen positioned over the top. Using a tablespoon, several spoonfuls of the soil solution were laid in a vertical line along the edge of the screen. With the largest squeegee, the solution was pulled horizontally across the screen to the left and then back to the right, making two passes. Lifting the screen revealed the soil print beneath. I was immediately pleased with the result, not least because it was satisfying to see an idea come to fruition and materially succeed. The print held together well, with some subtle bleeding in places, which was expected. A second print was made using slightly more solution and three passes of the squeegee. This resulted in a richer depth of soil browns and crisper topographic lines, with fewer bleeds. I continued to run several more prints before mixing a new soil solution with medium and repeating the process across the three unearthed soil sites.

The outcomes aligned closely with what I had hoped to visualise and test through this method and act of practice. The prints held mark, trace, vitality and a clear sense of soil and site. Overall, I was pleased with the experiment and moving forward I recognise this as another viable method for translating soil within my practice. It may have potential within a collective exhibition context, perhaps as a way of printing text, soil vitality data, or energy readings. Whatever form it eventually takes, this method feels likely to reappear and evolve further within my ongoing work.