Ruins III

Ruins III forms part of a series of three prints Paul Coldwell created for an exhibition at Sir John Soane’s Museum in 2019. Installed in the kitchens along with sculptures, ceramics and a film, the project aimed to shed light on the invisible labour that powered the house and underpinned Soane’s architectural practice. The Ruins prints, of which the present one is the most complex composition, depict classical architectural forms – a pyramid, a round tower, arches – constructed from sugar cubes, in a semi-ruined state, suggesting that Soane’s servants attempted to imitate both his architectural vocabulary and the Romantic penchant for ruins with sugar and other foodstuffs, ostensibly the only building materials to which they had ready access. Although the granular surface pattern of the print is reminiscent of Ben Day dots used in photomechanical printing processes, and resembles a photograph blown up to the point where it begins to lose definition, Coldwell produced the print with laser-cut woodblocks – a new twist on the oldest known printmaking technique – rather than a photomechanical process, setting up a tension between associations with Pop Art and photography, on the one hand, and the classical and monumental, on the other.

The artist; gift to The Courtauld, 2024

Thomas, Ben, ‘Paul Coldwell, Picturing the Invisible’, IMPACT Printmaking Journal no. 1, spring 2020, pp. 1-5