a tarlatan net
Mote102, 12th-14th September 2025

a tarlatan net brings together works made by Miriam Hancill over the course of her practice-based PhD project Obdurate matter? Unfolding potential within materials, apparatuses, and procedures of printmaking through speculative practice at Edinburgh College of Art. Through material interrogation, the project explores how the media and processes of printmaking can offer alternative procedural and conceptual approaches within contemporary print practices. 


Tarlatan – another term for scrim – a lightweight, open weave fabric, generally used in printmaking as a means of removing excess ink from metal etching plates, or gum arabic from the surface of limestone lithography stones. 

Here, the fabric has buffed the surface of the printing press, held furled in palm-sized pads; has been unravelled and had its threads scattered and tweezed; has been pushed into ink under the pressure of the printing press, becoming saturated before leaving its delicate, sticky impression behind on the paper’s surface. 

In this process of material reshaping, tarlatan/scrim has been transposed from an unassuming procedural tool to an artistic material in its own right. As it has been scrunched, unfurled, unravelled, and stretched out, the fabric has come into contact with other print matter – media, tools, apparatuses, and procedures that have ‘caught’ in tarlatan/scrim’s net-like weave. They have intermingled and reemerged in the making process, producing a range of visual phenomena in the printed images all the while inciting sensations of disturbance, uncertainty, and awkwardness, revealing a lively potential which can continue to unfold.