SlackPrint: Screen Printing at Slackspace, Colchester. Slack Space used to be the co op bank offices. It was empty, but now its a space for art music, what every people want to do there. "Our aim is to provide free accessible exhibitions, workshops and events for the general public and also to interrupt and enhance retail footfall in the town centre with art, music and performance." i wanted to set up a screen printing studio, and with the help of the nice people there I did.
The process.
It was very much as case of learning through doing, and hopefully will continue to be one. I made the screens with some mesh bought online ( after trying and failing to use old net curtain) and old picture frames. For squeegies I used strips of card. its not as good as rubber, but it does the job. doing the job is a pretty good rule for what things to use and what ways to do things in Slackprint. The designs are all done by hand cut stencils.
Above we see a T-shirt tapped down with newspaper inside it, and the image printed on all clean and nice.
but before it is printed onto the T-shirt each stencil is printed onto the big bed sheet on the big table. this way we can check that the stencil is as intended and test out colours. This also over time builds up into a weird and wonderful sort of mosaic of all the different things people have printed at SlackPrint.
The space.
The room that the studio is in used to be the post room back when it was the cooperative banks offices. A couple of people who came in said they remembered it being the Bank Offices, and to my surprise some one mentioned casually that the small room with the sink in just next to it (where we wash to screens) used to in fact be used for screen printing sings and posters to go up in the bank. Back when it made more sense to screen print posters etc. on site than send them off to be printed elsewhere.
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