Jill Wright: Interactive Art & Design MA graduate
MA Interactive Art & Design student Jill Wright has developed two new art forms that have got the art world pretty excited. She talks about how her disability has contributed to her art.
Jill Wright is the sort of person you just have to admire. She pootles round the Woodlane Campus in her motorised buggy and her colourful poncho with a permanent glint in her eye: the glint of an artist breaking new ground.
“I found my medium here. I love making prints.” Printmaking can be “quite a challenge” from a wheelchair and she began to find it difficult to keep asking for help cleaning up the equipment. “People were very helpful, but I felt awkward asking.”
She found the perfect solution: IT. “My tutor, Lawrence North, sat with me for ages, helping me learn the computer programmes. Gradually I gained independence and my knowledge grew.”
And then she had her Eureka moment. She’d made some etching plates and was thinking about enhancing them. “Something came over me and I decided to put the plate face down in the scanner. I turned it on and was amazed to find that the image appeared on the screen with every tiny mark that I’d made, all in extremely high relief.” Jill played around with the image in Photoshop, adding colour and putting more plates in to create layers.
“It all came from the frustration of not being able to do what I wanted to do physically,” she said. “I didn’t realise this was a new idea but everyone at College got very excited.” The tutors encouraged her to contact the editor of Printmaking Today who asked Jill to write an article about her new process. So she gave it a name: “Digitaglio”, after digital and intaglio, the Italian for etching.
Jill attributes a significant proportion of her success to the atmosphere at the College. “The atmosphere of this place is extraordinarily friendly and very supportive. Everybody is very open and generous about sharing their artist experiences with students. They don’t hold back, they aren’t precious. There’s a definite culture of support.”
She says the biggest plus has been the impact on her self-confidence and her ability to present her work. “Before, I was just too nervous to talk about my art, but they insist on it here and you get a lot of practice. Now I can talk about what I’m doing in a way that makes sense.”
And, as part of her MA, she invented another art form, this time in interactive web-based art. Online interactive art usually involves you finding and manipulating what the artist has already prepared. Jill’s idea is far more personal. “You can watch a series of my images randomly circulating through millions of combinations. When you like the combination, you pause it and print it out.” It’s your own, utterly unique piece of art, for free.
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