Practice Beyond Boundaries

Abstract

The Impact 12 Conference asked us to consider how print practitioners have been breaking boundaries through technological innovation and cross-disciplinary practice. What new territories have been unearthed through contesting the field and its proximal position to others? In our earliest conversations about these questions, we realised they were predicated on the assumption that breaking boundaries is good because it allows artists to pursue the new or unconventional. It also supposes that disciplinary progress will require an act of breaking, perhaps a rupture, transgression, or breaching. The notion of breaking boundaries also implies that we exist in a state of disciplinary limitations. Why is it that artists (including us at times) feel compelled to transgress boundaries and reshape the field? Finally, where do we locate the value of practice: Is it as they say ‘on the cutting edge’, or can value be oriented another way?
 In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have become preoccupied with the production and fortification of boundaries on a personal, community, and global scale. This paper was born from our realisation that the pandemic has amplified, redrafted, and problematised notions of the boundary in the collective imagination. This moment called us—two artists reaching across a disciplinary divide—to question the nature of boundaries and their implications. Our desire to critically assess the value of boundary-making and breaking led us to our thesis: Is there another way to approach disciplinarity without theorising boundaries, territories, and their rupture?