Makeready Readymade is a show about the unexpected, accidental beauty of printed waste.
“Make-ready sheets” are sheets of paper that a printer uses to get the colour right on a print run before starting a job. So the colour balance is often dramatically different from the final outcome. These sheets are sometimes run through the press at other times to soak up excess ink or to run down ink at the end of a run, so as not to waste fresh sheets of paper. In these cases the impressions of several different and disparate print runs can end up on a single sheet.
Focusing on a collection of make-ready sheets gathered over time from a local offset printer – and utilising make-readies from his own Risograph-based press – Stuart’s show is obsessed with the printerliness of ink on paper. It’s also entertained by the idea of exhibiting, and in the process re-valuing, a waste product. Makeready Readymade is partly an archive of these print artefacts and partly an exhibition in a book. The book, created specifically for this exhibition, combines offset, Risograph and letterpress printing, and is available in a limited edition of 250.
