The Expanded Print

This panel explores the materials, techniques, and embodied practices of printmaking with the goal of engendering a more capacious understanding of the medium and its ongoing potential as a field of art-historical inquiry.

While Marshall McLuhan famously proclaimed in Understanding Media (1964) that “the medium is the message”, here we ask whether reconceptualizing how we think and write about the medium of print might transform how we interpret its messages. We therefore take up Jennifer Roberts’ call in Contact: The Art and Pull of the Print (2024) to move away from conceptions of “medium specificity” towards one of “medium generativity”, to explore more inclusive and expansive approaches to “print”.

We seek to give a field that is rich in talent – but dispersed in temporal and geographic expertise – the opportunity to reassess its parameters. We wish to draw together scholars working across different time periods, disciplinary fields (including art history, material culture, media studies) and geographic focuses, and to encourage papers on traditional print techniques as well as other kinds of printed materials (photographs, films, textiles, wallpaper), and print-adjacent objects (armour, intaglio gems, seal matrices, etc.).

We seek proposals for 10 minute papers (followed by 10 minutes of discussion) exploring: the labour and gestures of printing (dabbing, cutting, digging, cleaning, drying), printmaking as embodied practice (with attention to race, gender, sexuality and disability), print materiality (varnishes, pigments, chemicals, matrices), the spaces of print (studio, darkroom, factory, office, film laboratory), and the intersections between printing and other media (sculpture, painting, photography, film).

Submit your Paper via this form. Please download, complete and send it directly to the Session Convenor(s) below by Sunday 2 November 2025:

Kirsty Sinclair Dootson, University College London, kirsty.dootson@ucl.ac.uk

Marika Takanishi Knowles, University of St Andrews, mk283@st-andrews.ac.uk

Esther Chadwick, The Courtauld Institute of Art, esther.chadwick@courtauld.ac.uk