A common complaint among artists is that when so much has been created already, and so many boundaries have been well and truly trodden into the ground by their predecessors, how do you ever produce something new? ‘I remember first reading The Shock of the New and thinking it was amazing how conventions have been challenged and how artists have kept re-inventing what we’ve understood art to mean’, says screen print artist Joanna Ham. The downside though, is that ‘it makes it really hard for artists today to actually do something new because everything’s been done!’. With her unique approach to print-making however, she does carve out an individual niche in a crowded creative world. ‘I really wanted to do something fresh’, she says. ‘It’s laborious, but I think this process is something that hasn’t really been done before’. 

Starting by taking clippings of figures and shapes she finds in magazines, a hobby Ham’s had since childhood, she’ll collect up ‘boxes of arms and legs’ before collaging the right pieces together to form a figure. ‘I find patterns really interesting, so I look for the bits of text and words that appear on the backs of things’. For instance, in one image, a photograph of a flag taken from an advert becomes a Jil Sander style striped maxi skirt. In order to transform her collages into an image that can be screen printed, Ham exposes the cut-and-paste collage to make a photogram. ‘I’ve got no idea what it’s going to look like when I expose it to the light’, so while, ‘wonderful things happen according to what’s on the back of the pictures, I’d say 80% are a disaster and come out a mess’. For this reason, Ham will scan the photogram into Photoshop before digitally cutting it up and re-collaging it into an image she’s pleased with and filling in the gaps using ‘a paint tool that looks like watercolour’. She admits, ‘the heads and the hands never work so I’ll draw them all in by hand using my laptop’s track-pad and my finger’. 

The finished image could of course be printed digitally from here, but, Ham says, ‘you’d struggle to get the density and crispness’ that can be achieved with the thick black in her technician Marco uses at The Print Club in Dalston, where her work is ultimately realised. She’s right – the intricacy of the collaged image silhouetted over dense blackness is seriously arresting and infused with dark beauty.   

This inventiveness is all very well, but then of course, there’s the further stone in the artist’s shoe over whether work becomes less valuable if it favours aesthetic over agenda. ‘Work that tries to challenge how you think often combines with not looking beautiful’, Ham says, reflecting on her own personal grappling with that issue. ‘I love drawing beautiful things and I like to put beautiful things on the wall’, she reasons. ‘But I also think that having something you can read into is important as well, so I try to create work that combines both of those things’. 

Such is the streamlining of imagery that takes place as Ham’s images evolve from collections of magazine cuttings into bold, simple, monochrome, makes them as beautiful as they are clever. They manage to be at once calm but impactful, modern yet timeless and memorable without being confrontational. A background in advertising meant that for Ham, ‘the idea of how to make the everyday beautiful really interested me’.   To her the idea of re-invention and making something her own is part of the joy of creating. ‘What’s wonderful is that as you experiment the image becomes like an animation and you discover things that change the whole image’, she says. The finished images recall the figures and poses of fashion imagery, but the clippings Ham makes aren’t exclusively taken from trend pages. ‘It doesn’t matter what they’re pictures are of because it’s more about patterns and how they work on the page’. In fact, ‘it’s really what’s on the back of the pictures that makes them so interesting’.  

For Ham, he balance between beauty and subtext exists very much in the complex relationship between the artist, the work and the viewer of it. As an artist, refining her unique process into simple-seeming but deceptively complex pieces allows her to push herself to try techniques that are not necessarily being widely used, while weaving in visual ambiguities, and to set up emotional triggers that allow the viewer to derive their own significance and individual reactions to the work. ‘I have people who look at my prints and say they see how they imagine their mother looked in the 50s or some people see someone who is vulnerable, I suppose it just depends what they’re going through’, she says, adding, ‘It’s about what you feel, not what you’re meant to think’. For this reason, Ham’s figures will always have their gaze obscured by glasses, or hands, or by being turned away. ‘I don’t really like them engaging with you directly, she says. ‘It means people can put their own thoughts onto the face’. This has its aesthetic benefits too. ‘This way you can put them on your wall without having some guy staring at you!’. 

Perhaps it is possible to invent something new after all, and with images that are subtle enough to display every day, that manage to be though-provoking and technically inventive, and are also beautiful enough to make you stop and stare, Joanna Ham is certainly on her way to achieving it.