Blueprint was completed under the prompt to create 100 of anything. After struggling with the prompt for about a week, I decided to try making prints of the broken mechanisms of watch faces after breaking one.

The first step towards creating this series was to consciously disassemble watch faces and mechanisms. In this process, the pieces permanently lose their ability to keep rhythm time. Ripping apart mechanism from face, the hands of the watch fall off and the bracketing which keeps the watch together is bent out of shape. Flat metal pieces, called watch bridges, were flattened (if necessary), inked, and run through the press to create embossed shapes.

The mechanisms and faces were kept together to create a sense of diagram on each print. Thus, each small print is effectively a blow-up diagram of what it used to be.

Blueprint is an exercise in repetition and deconstruction, tokenizing the complicated relationship that we hold with time. The process of printmaking not only enforced a methodical clockwork to the creation of the piece itself, but is also unique in the ability to place an embossed and literal imprint of time on paper. The use of blue ink implies a cyclical opposite to construction, creating an inverted blueprint in order to create a diagram of deconstruction. Later on, the uniqueness of the shapes in Blueprint would inspire my senior exercise in printmaking almost two years after completing the piece.