“Like squishy, tactile pixels”: Rosie Clements prints her photographs on bubble wrap

During her time at graduate school Rosie Clements was lucky enough to have access to a small Roland UV printer in her university’s print lab. A nifty device that she quickly became familiar with for her many outlandish material experiments, this printer changed her image-making process entirely. “I printed photographs on every surface I could find, including popcorn ceiling tiles, fake fur and rocks,” the photographer says. “Many of these attempts failed — the images were either entirely illegible or, at times, overly sharp.”

However, one afternoon the photographer “stumbled across a sheet of bubble wrap on the sidewalk” and decided to give it a whirl. “The results thrilled me”, she says, “the bubbles reminded me of squishy, tactile pixels, and the application added a new dimensionality to the image.” This relationship between image and material has captivated Rosie ever since, informing her latest series of photo prints on bubble wrap, Pure Semblance.

Drawn to the way the technique renders images legible from afar, but completely abstract up close, the photographer has found the kind of photographs that work with this inventive process are always the more simple compositions: intimate portraits, close-ups, detail shots. “I think a lot of my photographs are pretty simple, and I’ve been critiqued for that in the past. But, in this case, it actually works in my favour,” the photographer says, “when printing on bubble wrap, less is more — keeping the image simple lets the texture and material do their thing without overpowering the photo.”

Although image making is not new to Rosie (she’s been snapping images since she was a teenager, using her family’s point and shoot), printmaking is a more recent craft that she’s been exploring: “UV printing is super new for me — I’ve only been experimenting in this way for a little over a year. I keep coming back to it because there’s still so much to explore!” The print process uses UV light to cure ink, as opposed to heat (like most standard printers), meaning the machines can print on all kinds of surfaces. “To make a UV print, you need to determine the highest point of the material you’re working with. The printhead then consistently sprays ink at that elevation throughout the print. In my work, this means that the details of the image are rendered sharply on top of the bubbles, as they are closer to the print head, while the areas between the bubbles become blurry or completely obscured,” she explains. Facing a lot of trial and error with these highly “sensitive” machines, Rosie has discovered that there is no exact way to control exactly where the details of an image will fall on a surface like bubble wrap, and that is part of the magic of the process.

Lately the artist has been drawn to presenting her delicate bubble wrap prints in plexiglass boxes, enjoying the contrast between the very tactical surface of her images and their confinement to a clear plastic case. “It reminds me of looking at an image on Instagram, trapped behind the glass of my screen,” she says. The artist wanted to push the print method further and experiment with other modes of display such as having images adhered to windows where “light filters through and makes them glow”. Rosie says: “I have a dream of covering a huge wall of windows with a massive bubble wrap print someday… UV printers are often used to make billboards, so the print beds can be gigantic — it would totally be possible to make this idea happen!”

Most captivated by the relationship between the physicality of her bumpy images and our flattened hyper-digital worlds, Rosie is interested in the increasing lack of distinction between “our digital and physical selves [...] I think I’m subconsciously trying to remind myself of the importance of spending time with people in real life,” she concludes. “For me, making this work serves as a reminder of the importance of physical presence and interaction in the digital age. I’m trying to anchor myself in the tactile.”