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What would it mean to approach the model of a print workshop from an ‘intra-active’ perspective (Barad, 2007)? That is, to explore such environments as dynamic, agential and material-discursive phenomena? Considering workshop commonalities (such as printers’ preparation and processing of plates, stones or screens), as well as specificities (individual expertise, technological apparatuses, ecological approaches, spatial dynamics, differing models of collaboration), we wish to ask: How do prints operate in the workshop setting as non-human (objects, things, materials) and humans (artists, printers, institutions) mingle and/or intra-act?

Following Jennifer L. Roberts’ (2024) close investigations of the materiality of print processes, this session proposes further enquiry into the social and material groundings of the print workshop. Despite scholarly examinations of individual 'master printers' (Stanley William Hayter, Robert Blackburn, Kenneth Tyler, Stanley Jones); particular print workshop set-ups (Paul Laidler, 2011; Christina Weyl, 2019) and important collaborating printers’ accounts of working with artists (Craig Zammiello, Kathan Brown, Phil Sanders) this area remains seldom studied and undertheorized.

This session invites artists, art historians, curators, educators, printers and printmaking workshops to consider these often neglected ecologies from various perspectives, drawing on new-materialism and related interdisciplinary methodologies including decolonial, feminist, intersectional and eco-critical approaches. Taking account of print-making’s transitory states as well as its interrelationships with wider material, social, political, economic and institutional networks, we welcome proposals that delve into the dynamics of collaboration, tacit learning and embodied knowledge, and corresponding values in and beyond the print workshop, to elucidate these important and currently threatened infrastructures.