YEE-HAW INDUSTRIES

IMAGES FROM GALLERY STOKES
View exhibition online here.

A word about the work from Kevin Bradley:
This body of prints exists as a testament to my less-than-anal methods of printmaking. This collection consists of mis-registered, mis-inked and otherwise mis-guided efforts of the edition process. These prints are a by-product of the original editions. They have not been treated or considered special. They were at first bastard prints; the proper term for them is “make-ready prints” used for alignment and the pressure adjustment on the press while printing other editions. Of course they have also evolved into their own during the process of over printing and excessive layering of information; they have become a working history of what happens on the press.

I have always been attracted to the accident. That is where the mystery lives. I feel like the things we throw away and discard without thought are often things of simple beauty and truth that cannot be achieved consciously. The make-ready print serves a purpose to the printmaker in that the accident can be incorporated into editions and still keep the vitality of surprise that the process tries to kill.

These prints exist as a working conversation between type and image, between content and concept and between form and function. These 41" x 29" prints are hand-inked and hand-printed on a 4'x10' Tackach relief press using wood type, lead type and carved wood blocks at the studio of Yee-Haw Industries in Knoxville, Tennessee, over a period of three years (2006-2009). They are part of a larger series of make-ready prints that document the history of a working letterpress shop from 1997 until present.