Rosen Room
Created: 2022-12-26 (22:16:09) — Modified: 2025-06-17 (19:20:45)Status: completed
For a couple years my favourite place in this entire city was in the art school, in a dusty grotto we called the rosen room.
Step down into a minor labyrinth of stained concrete floors and movable partitions, filled with solvent smells, charcoal dust, easels, racks and all manner of esoteric equipment. The printing press, its enormous metal platen and wheel, took up almost an entire room of its own.
The only way into the rosen room was through a glass door papered with hazard signs. To even set foot in there you needed a filtration mask, gloves, goggles. I wore my inkstained apron to be safe. There was single window, smeared, which looked over the vacant lot. Hanging from four chains in front of it was an iron mesh.
On the other side and occupying nearly the whole length of this cramped room was a metal box with a crank and a drawer. It was filled with fine powder, rosen, that if you breathed it in would settle in your lungs and there forever remain. Hence the mask, the gloves, the goggles, my apron, a sort-of charm.
You had to bang the sides of this metal box to dislodge the rosen, then turn the crank to work the bellows that would heave clouds of it upward. Safely confined but when you opened the drawer to slide your plate in, no matter how quickly you worked it would leak out in a lovely orange miasma. No matter the ventilation fans, the mask, the gloves, the goggles, the apron, you never could be sure you were not still inhaling miniscule gasps of it.
But among all the hazardous quarters and substances in the printmaking department, among the bitumen, hydrochloric acid, methylated spirits and turpentine, among fume cupboards and crushing rollers, the rosen room was the one that captured me.
Intaglio printmaking is nothing like drawing. You carry your metal plate through a series of alchemical-seeming operations, coat it in bitumen, scrape it back, etch, recoat, etch. Or incise directly into the plate. Or if you are in the rosen room you let the fine powder settle on its surface, set it on the mesh and delicately swing it over an open flame to melt it on.
This process, aquatint, is easy to fuck up. If the plate is greasy the rosen will fail to adhere. Leave the plate in the metal box among the swirling clouds too long and there will be no exposed metal left to etch. Sometimes you can do everything right and it will still just look a bit shitty. Most of us did not take to this tiny room and its swirling clouds of colophony.
When you got it right though… when with frenetic cranking and patience and delicate manouevering over flames you melted the rosen on just so, it really was like alchemy. Mordant ate away at the exposed metal. Run through the press it produced an even expanse that up close revealed itself to be a pointilist universe. Miniscule stars of blank paper amidst the pooled ink. Fortuitous galaxies.
Intaglio printmaking turns the metal plate into the engine that generates the image. Working in the rosen room, working with aquatint, felt like something further than this. Turn the crank and cede control. You got something less predictable than an engine. You got a world.
Endmatter
Tags: @completed @real-spaces
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