The Magic Boomerang (Time Stands Still)

Gabrielle Hoad | The Magic Boomerang (Time Stands Still) | 2023 | 
Photo-silkscreen print 53cm x 15.5cm 

My four printing classes with Double Elephant Print Workshop in Exeter are now complete and I’ve been trying to make sense of what I've achieved. I have a long way to go to be in control of my screen-printing technique (too many smudges, blots, slips and uneven applications of ink) but I have learned a lot about the possibilities.

Rather than trying to make an edition or a perfectly registered four-colour prints, I was primarily interested in using screen-printing as a way of exploring time, sequence, layering and repetition. These long, thin images of overlapping frames are the result. 

I've been working with found images from a 1960's children’s TV programme called The Magic Boomerang. The series centres on a magic boomerang: when it flies in the sky all time stands still, but the thrower is still able to move. It felt like a fun way of revisiting my longstanding interest in work of the chronophotographer Etienne Jules Marey(1830 -1904), his fascination with capturing the motion of animals, and his pioneering work in the development of cinema.

I've enjoyed the ways the images acquire traces of the different processes through which they've passed, from scratching and wear on the analogue film to digitisation to halftone processing and physical printing with sticky ink. I hope to return to Double Elephant by the summer to work more independently and develop this work further.