AMY POTENGER

During her residency at Auckland Print Studio, Amy Potenger extended the iterative logic of her painting practice into monotype printmaking. As part of her recent painting workflow, she has been digitally scanning and scaling collected vintage stickers. These images are then traced from the screen onto paper and cut into stencils, which are then transferred to canvas. For the monotypes, the stencils themselves—creased and torn pieces of tracing paper littered with scraps of masking tape—were arranged onto paper, and ink was printed through them, turning these once-provisional guides into central motifs. The move fits Potenger’s broader method of letting studio by-products and materials such as leftover paint, as well as tools and peripheral activities such as cataloguing off-cuts, generate new directions.

​

The same cycle of layering, reuse, and revision was extended on the flatbed offset press. The fixed dimensions of hand-cut stencils replaced the elastic scale of digital montage, imposing a productive compositional constraint. As in her paintings, covering and revealing remained central operations, successive layers both obliterating and preserving earlier decisions. Solutions for problems, such as a custom stencil cut for the purpose of resolving an awkward gap, become subjects when the same stencil provides a new compositional element in a different print.

​

Unforeseen chromatic combinations of transparent overlays of ink guided subsequent colour choices. Layers of ink combined with layers of iridescent material reset passages which drifted too dark. These colour-shift layers invite the viewer to move around the work: what appears violet head-on might flare to green at an angle, and images buried two or three layers back surface only when the paper catches raking light or the eye lingers long enough to receive new transmissions.

​

Titled Teletext, the series borrows its name from the pre-internet broadcast service whose blocky text pages emerged line-by-line on television screens. The reference underscores the prints’ modular construction and their negotiation between analogue apparatus and digital logic. Teletext also references time-based viewing; the unhurried, cumulative absorption of information. As with her paintings, meaning unfolds over time via translation, fragmentation, and adaptation, and slow looking is rewarded.

​​​

Read the accompanying essay by Becks Ireland here.