In all art history fields based on printed material, research conventionally focuses on the images, and other information that was printed. The objects used to produce that information (including cut woodblocks, engraved metal plates, and lithographic stones) have been neglected. Many hundreds of thousands of these historical printing surfaces survive today in the East as in the West.

As relics of historical crafts and industry, they fall outside the modern disciplines, and the vast majority are even inaccessible to researchers because they are uncatalogued and often considered ‘uncatalogue-able’. However, as individual objects and as an untapped category of cultural heritage, these artefacts of printing offer a great deal of information that the finished prints, books, fabrics, and other printed materials do not.

The proposed panel will respond to the need for a multidisciplinary introduction to what in image-based fields are called ‘print matrices’ – ‘printing surfaces’ in text-based fields.

Following from the conference Blocks Plates Stones (London, 2017) the monographic issue of Memofonte journal (2017) and the volume Printing things (2023), the first facilitated discussion of the use of such objects in research, this panel will represent the state of research in this new and developing field. It will bring together object-based research, collection-level surveys, historical printing practices, ethical considerations of their storage and use (or nonuse) today, methods for multiplying the originals (eg dabs, stereos, electros), and methodological studies. By doing so, it will facilitate their introduction into historical research across the disciplines.

Talks

"Matrices and the Printmaking Process"

• Angela CAMPBELL - The Matrix in the Mix: the Financial and Physical Role of Copper in the Production of Early Modern Engraving
• Yu-Chih LAI - Printing on Chinese Paper: The Material and Technological Translation of Battle Prints at the Qing Court in the 18th Centur
• Francesca TANCINI - Colour-Printing in the Age of Mass-Production: Edmund Evans’s Printing Matrices
• Edgar CASANOVA, Jose Luis RUVALCABA-SIL, Alejandro MITRANI , Nora Ariadna PEREZ - “Flora del Valle de Mexico” by Jose Maria Velasco: Understanding its production from watercolor to lithography