For this series of exploited aprons, I deliberately printed life size aprons to fully express the reality of exploitation of house wife/mothers who choose to raise their children at home. This decision was made after disappointing attempts to etch and print smaller custom made aprons from zinc plates.
Exploited friends and relatives contributed around forty aprons, which gave me a large choice of shapes and fabrics. Instead of producing editions, I made monoprints and variations, which allowed me to use many of the donated aprons and to deal with various aspects of exploitation.
In order to print these life size aprons, I had to find a printing surface that was larger than the standard size zinc plate that I usually used. I chose a sheet of arborite which was larger than the BFK Rives paper and therefor there is no plate mark on these prints.
These are not photographic images. The camera has not been used in any part of their production. They are contact images which have been made in ink, directly from the aprons themselves. Their threads can be seen. The folds of fabric that have been flattened by passing through the etching press, give some of the aprons a crushed appearance. The density and the even flatness of dark backgrounds can only be produced by the process which I used to print them.
The first apron that I printed on arborite was the Brown Work Apron. Without etching the arborite, I made the apron impression by laying the apron flat in a layer of brown ink on the arborite surface and then passing it through the etching press. When I removed the apron fabric, the resulting impression on the arborite surface was surrounded by printing ink. It was either wiped away to leave a clean surface around the image, or overprinted to produce a dark background from inked card printed around a block out stencil. Most of the exploited aprons were printed this way, using various colours of ink.
In total, I produced around thirty five different apron monoprints. In 1985, fourteen of these monoprints were included in my Solo Exhibition of thirty two prints, at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery, in Oshawa Ontario. That Exhibition travelled to Halifax, N.S. in 1986, with funding from the office of the Secretary of State. It was exhibited at the Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery. The exhibition was reviewed in the Halifax Chronicle Herald and later in the Arts Atlantis Journal.*
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