Out of Register

For most of its life this piece had no name, and that was deliberate. It began as a fork of another work, taken at its third version in July and carried off in its own direction, and for a month it went out as images with no words attached. I referred to it by its folder number. Naming a thing early decides what it is before you know, and I wanted to find out first.

It is a quilt in the sense that it is pieced. A field of banded blocks is laid down across the sheet, oversized and pushed off centre, so what you are given is a crop of something that plainly continues past every edge. Most sheets carry a sash, a wide band that crosses the picture and now and then breaks out of its own frame. Some carry a lattice instead. Some carry nothing over the field at all, and those turned out to be the strongest of them, which I did not expect and had to be told.

Out of register is a printing fault. It is what you call it when the colour plate lands a hair off the black and the image doubles at its own edges. Here it is not a fault, it is the method. The rule that borders the sheet is knocked a fraction off the grid it belongs to. The field is laid off phase. The sash refuses the frame it is given. I had been doing all of this separately for weeks before I noticed it was one thing, and the title came from noticing. Nothing in it lines up, and that is what holds it together.

The sheet is composition too, not a mount for it. Edges are torn or deckled, a plate mark presses into the paper, a margin carries swatches and registration marks and the occasional ink test, and one edge has usually been dipped and taken the wash whole. All of it is softened into the same air at the end, so the marks belong to the paper rather than sitting on top of it. A signature seat sits in the corner, and a third of the edition is not signed at all.

The colour behaves like dyeing rather than picking. A vat is chosen for the sheet, a cloth is drawn from it, and if that cloth comes up muddy or too quiet it goes back and is drawn again from its own separate stream of chance, so a poor draw is re-dipped instead of accepted. The second cloth has to argue with the first without shrieking at it. The dye that goes over the top has to clash properly or go dark. I could not have written those rules at the start. I found them by rating sheets, one at a time, for weeks.

That is the part of the work I am most pleased with and least proud of. Across four rounds I scored several hundred sheets by hand and then changed the rules to chase the scores, and the average of the edition climbed from about 2.9 out of five to about 3.9. For three of those rounds I was certain the sash was the problem, and I kept shaving it back. It was not the sash. It was one particular cut inside it, a heavy slab that did nothing for any sheet it landed on, and it only became visible once the louder faults around it had been fixed. Each round can only show you the fault the last round stopped hiding. I removed the slab and left the sash alone.

All of it comes from a single number, the token hash, split into separate streams so that colour, layout, frame and atmosphere each draw from their own source and a change in one does not reshuffle the others. And all of it is vector, from the first shape to the last, which means the work has no fixed size. The instructions are the piece, and the instructions are infinite. It can live as small as a screen or as large as a wall and lose nothing on the way up.