An artist's book and large-format print series chronicling a decade of travels through Europe, incorporating laser-cut photography and letterpress-printed text responses.

For almost a decade I travelled across Europe multiple times touring with bands; tour manager, musician, driver, merch seller. By 2020 the work stopped. Multiple reasons: Brexit, Covid, parenthood, family illness. The book is a way to document that time via image and text that interrogate memory, chronology and location. Technically, the photographic images are burnt into the paper, each sheet placed inside the laser-cutter, one by one. The need to not burn through the paper requires careful machine controls and results in a gauzy, hazy image, mirroring the nature of unreliable memories.

The large format series exhibited here extends the book off the page and into the world of studio spaces and galleries. Whereas each page of the book spotlights a single location, these six large format works represent multiple journeys, point-to-point and via other cities. There are five layers that comprise each final work: three photographs laser-cut into the paper and two colour passes of text printed letterpress on a Vandercook 4. Each one is an edition of seven.

David Armes, Red Plate Press