Relief Award 2024

Daniel Howden

The Kitchen Sink

Jackson's Art Prize 2024, Bankside Gallery 2024
Lino
Paper
30 x 30 cm

£2,000

“The Kitchen Sink comprises of 277 individual registrations and is part of an ongoing reduction linocut series focusing on bulk artificial matter and its properties.

Whenever I’m confronted with large quantities of anything manufactured, my first thought is always concern for landfill, but there’s certainly an undeniable aesthetic appeal to the sheer mass of product, too. As crushing as it is to the planet, I’m drawn towards the cheap qualities of plastic matter and the way I layer ink is highly effective at capturing the sheen and artificial colourings that contrast so well with the muted palette of the natural world. Gradually, my palette has become more pastel, introducing a delicacy into the objects.

I’ve spent over a decade developing my somewhat unorthodox jigsaw approach to linocut that always references imagery that I’ve captured myself. Once transferred onto the drawn block, I separate the components of the sketch before piecing each individual slab back together onto the page, one by one. My maximalist approach to composition is aided by my scattered, methodical print process. Inherently, cutting something up into smaller pieces embraces a chaos of sorts and so there’s a parallel between what I’m creating and how I’m creating it.”