This issue of AusArt focuses on the world of printmaking, and among its articles we will find discourses, research and artistic practices around the processes involved in printmaking. Indeed, printmaking is understood here as a flexible territory, from which practices can become agents of conceptualisation, beyond the technical and procedural framework to which it has traditionally belonged. The articles included in this issue deal with areas linked to graphic techniques from their most processual approach, concepts that the graphic work reveals in its execution and presentation to the public, specific artistic practices...

In the more technical dimension of graphics, various methods of creating matrices are presented, reflecting the search for alternatives and variations on traditional processes. They explore new possibilities of creating a matrix, of registering an image on aluminium or steel, and of creating by methods associated with destruction, such as setting fire to a matrix to generate a trace and therefore an image. The notion of registering a trace is extended to the public dimension of graphics, finding in hybridisation a path and method of creation.

The graphic as a concept nourishes, and in turn feeds, various perspectives of analysis, but especially linked to the trace, to leaving a record of passage, of movement... a record that reactivates memory. Thus, some of the articles include practices linked to the body and the performative, to memory and the archival, to the social and political, from a gender perspective, through methodologies based on interdisciplinarity and hybridisation. In short, graphic art understood as a representative and representation of the path, the body, the archive and the feminine.

We analyse artistic proposals that respond to the personal interests and visions of each author. Many of these proposals are evidence of the process of openness in which the graphic arts are immersed, open to integration with different disciplines and establishing new creative formulas where territories are blurred to promote an expanded vision of contemporary graphic arts, a field of research that we hope this issue of AusArt will help to disseminate.

Myriam Gesalaga and Eva Mayo

Coordinators of the monographic issue