Rough and Tumble: Off Grid Printmaking in the Desert

My paper offers a participant-theory of Farrington Press (Joshua Tree, CA) as an alternative model of a printshop that encourages collaboration with the site’s surrounding materials and environments. Begun in 2018 by Kyle Simon and Sarah Chance, Farrington is a remote, off-grid printmaking workshop in the California desert. As an artist who has produced two editions while in residence at the printshop, I aim to show how the material exigencies and environmental setting of the press pushed my work into new practices and ideas about the ecologies of printmaking.

Farrington is completely solar-powered, and water is trucked in along a twenty-mile dirt road. Invited artists, including Tara Donovan, Mary Weatherford, Honor Titus, and myself, are encouraged to use material scavenged from local scrap piles or the surrounding high desert environment. These environs require a shift in the established patterns of making, placing the artist in conscious collaboration with the practicalities of limited resources. On cloudy days, the hydraulic press in not available. Water use, essential for most printing, must be extremely limited. Making prints is always arguably an ‘intra-active’ collaboration with countless entities nameable and invisible. However, while many printers aim to minimize the unpredictability of materials, shops like Farrington intentionally refuse to take the intra-activity of prints for granted. Ultimately, as I argue in this paper, my experience at Farrington Press convinced me that the model of the printshop itself must often be re-investigated and re-invented to fully realize the relational and ecological possibilities of print.