The Human Brings The Electricity
Tacit Knowledge, Embodied Attention and the Printmaking Process in the Work of Käthe Kollwitz and Tracey Emin.
Abstract
This paper examines how the mechanical processes of printmaking, including etching, lithography and woodcut, function not as barriers to human expression but as uniquely powerful conductors of embodied tacit knowledge.
Drawing on Michael Polanyi’s concept of the tacit dimension and Iain McGilchrist’s neurological research into hemispheric modes of attention, this paper argues that the apparent indirection of printmaking, the plate, the press, the ink, the paper, forces a shift from analytical conscious control toward right-hemisphere embodied knowing.
The result is a form of transmission that bypasses language entirely, pressing human experience into permanent physical form with a fidelity no other medium achieves. Through the practices of Käthe Kollwitz and Tracey Emin, the paper argues that the printmaker functions as an antenna, receiving and transmitting embodied knowledge through inert materials that carry no charge of their own. The process by which the artist becomes fully present, a live wire able to conduct what cannot be consciously articulated, is both the subject and the argument of this paper. The human brings the electricity.
Introduction
When I was a child I remember how precious it felt to hold an old worn five pound note in my hand. Soft like your favourite t-shirt you’ve had for years and somehow can’t throw away. Because sometimes objects we love grow on us, like a second skin. In my hand I’d feel the paper note. Its surface now fuzzy like the way old songs hum through the radio.
My mum had an old radio and the antennae snapped off. It lost signal so I fixed it with a fork from the cutlery drawer. A tuning fork to catch the signal, and it worked.
Sometimes you would receive an old note that had been torn and mended with sellotape. Someone had received it damaged and instead of throwing it away had repaired it and passed it on. Keeping the chain unbroken. There was something in that small act that has stayed with me. Strangers linked by these worn and mended notes, united in trust, in the exchange of tokens of kindness. Humanity reaching humanity across the gap between one pair of hands and the next.
We don’t often think about what a banknote actually is. Just simple paper and ink. Yet it carries value, not because of what it is made of but because of what passed through it. Because human hands have held it, needed it, repaired it, passed it on. The value lives in that history of contact. It is written into the fibres.
A print works the same way. Not just as a metaphor but a material fact.
Paper and ink. A surface you can feel with your fingertip. The slight relief of the inked line, varied plate tone, the weight of the deckled edge sheet where the press pushed marks into its surface.
These are not aesthetic details. They are evidence. Evidence that something real happened here. That a human body was present in the making. That knowledge which could not be spoken was pressed into permanent form by the meeting of plate, ink, press and paper.
And like the worn banknote held up to the light, the longer you look, the more you find. The print invites a slow way of looking. It rewards prolonged attention. It asks you to slow down, to get close, to look again. In that sustained looking something happens that is closer to touch than we usually acknowledge. The body begins to know things the mind has not yet formed words for.
This paper argues that this is not accidental. That printmaking, its materials, its processes, its irreversible decisions is uniquely designed to transmit what Polanyi calls tacit knowledge. The things we know but cannot speak. The things the body holds that language cannot articulate. Through the practices of Käthe Kollwitz and Tracey Emin, it argues that the printmaker functions as an antenna. The plate, the ink, the press are inert conductors, waiting. The human brings the electricity.
1. Printmaking: Weight, Defiance and Living Practice
Printmaking has the weight of history and traditional practices behind it but it also allows for constant exploration. It is sometimes misread as conservative, a retreat from the contemporary. This is precisely wrong. Photopolymer gravure. Solar plate. Laser etched surfaces. The integration of digital image-making with analogue printing processes. These are not compromises with tradition. They are tradition doing what it has always done. Testing. Refining. Asking what this material can hold next.
What remains constant across centuries of innovation is the fundamental encounter. Plate, ink, press, paper, human body. The weight of the press using gravity to force something into existence that could not exist any other way. Heavy means in service of the most subtle transmission. The community of printmakers who sustain this practice carry between them a collective body of tacit knowledge. Techniques passed hand to hand, problems solved in studios and shared across continents. No manual fully captures it. No tutorial completely transmits it. You have to feel the ink. You have to read the plate. You have to know in your hands what the press is telling you.
This is a practice with a defiant edge. The torn border of the printed sheet refusing to be neat. Simple materials, tested and distilled across centuries, holding the most complex human experience. Paper and ink pressed together under weight, transmitting what language cannot reach. And the human who arrives at the press with embodied knowledge, with attention, with willingness to be changed by the encounter, that human brings something no digital process can replicate.
The electricity.
There is something else printmaking does that is rarely named. It captures so-called mistakes. The acid that bit deeper than intended. The ink that spread beyond the planned boundary. The tremor in the line. The place where the hand hesitated. All of it goes through the press. All of it arrives on the paper. In a culture obsessed with curation, with filtered images and edited selves, the print is an act of radical honesty. It records what actually happened. Not what the artist intended. What they did, with their actual hands, in their actual body, on that actual day.
There is also no delete button. In a world where every digital act is reversible, where undo is the default and nothing has to commit, the print stands completely apart. Every mark is a decision that cannot be unmade. The plate remembers everything. And that irreversibility is not a limitation. It is the condition that makes genuine aliveness possible. When you know there is no delete button something shifts in the body. You cannot half-commit. You cannot hover. You have to be fully present for every mark because every mark is permanent.
The printmaking studio is like a physical gym for tuning a certain mode of attending.
2. Theoretical Framework: Polanyi, McGilchrist and the Live Wire.
There is a paradox at the heart of printmaking. The process is highly technical. It demands method, sequence, precision. The careful preparation of the plate. The mixing and spreading of ink. The careful positioning of paper. The monitoring of pressure. These are not vague or intuitive acts. They are exacting, methodical, repeatable. And yet what emerges from this technical rigour is frequently something the maker could not have consciously produced. Something that often surprises even the person who made it.
This is not accidental. It is the mechanism that makes it so unique.
In contemplative traditions, the mantra functions not as the destination but as the vehicle. Chanted aloud at first, audible, present, effortful. But as the practice deepens the mantra moves inward. It becomes inaudible to the onlooker. Still there, whirring quietly in the background, but no longer on the surface. The repeated phrase gives the analytical mind something to chew on, a task sufficiently absorbing that it stops interfering with what is happening underneath. You cannot silence the controlling mind by force. But you can occupy it. And in that occupation something else becomes possible.
Printmaking works identically. The careful inking of the plate. The registration of the paper on the press bed. The repeated, physical, sequential acts that structure the process. These are the mantra. They occupy the left hemisphere, which McGilchrist describes as grasping, controlling, categorising, reaching always for language and certainty. Meanwhile, the right hemisphere, more receptive, attuned to the embodied and the contextual, begins to operate. Tacit knowledge, which cannot be summoned directly, sneaks through unseen.
This connects directly to what Polanyi means when he describes the internalisation of tools. When the maker is very adept, the tools become invisible, extensions of the body rather than objects in the hand. The blind person stops feeling the cane and starts feeling the ground through it. The printmaker stops feeling the press and starts feeling the plate through the press. Feeling the ink through the plate. Feeling the paper through the ink. The whole apparatus becomes transparent. The mantra has gone inward. Still whirring. But silently now. And the body’s full attention is freed for what the material is actually offering.
This is what Polanyi means when he says we know more than we can tell. The knowledge is there, accumulated through years of practice, stored in the body, in the hands, in the nervous system. It cannot be accessed by reaching for it analytically. It can only be released by creating the right conditions. Printmaking, through its material logic and its technical demands, reliably creates those conditions.
The artist, in this state, becomes a live wire. Fully present, fully conducting. Transparent to the material. In a state in which more than consciously articulated knowledge is expressed. The printmaking process encourages and facilitates this particular state. The plate, the ink, the press are inert conductors. Water and oil carrying no electricity of their own. The human arrives and completes the circuit.
3. Käthe Kollwitz: Grief Pressed Into Form
To develop: approximately 300-350 words so far.
Key points to develop:
Introduce Kollwitz: historical context, working across etching, lithography, woodcut. Methods and processes she works with.
Her woodcuts demand sustained physical presence. The resistance of the wood grain, the force required, the permanence of the marks made.
Diary entries describing states of concentrated absorption while printmaking, The thinking mind absent, something else working through her hands.
Her writing reaches toward the work rather than explaining it. Written word as antenna tuned to the same frequency as the making.
Central argument: the grief in Mother with Dead Child (1903) is not represented. It is transmitted. You receive it bodily before you understand it intellectually. The plate held and the etching ink carried it. The press transferred it to paper. The human brought the electricity that was conducted.
The Diary and Letters of Kathe Kollwitz.
4. Tracey Emin: What Lithography Captures That Painting Cannot
To develop: approximately 300-350 words. Notes so far:
Focus specifically on printmaking, particularly lithographs and monoprints.
Plan: Find Emin’s own words about lithography capturing what painting cannot. Search Strangeland, White Cube essays and published interviews. Reference video of Emin talking about her reasons for choosing lithography in favour of other methods.
The indirection of lithography concentrates something that direct mark-making obscures. The mediation and the pressure force the body’s knowledge into form without the conscious mind intervening.
The productive tension in Emin’s practice: explicit language in neon and sewn text versus tacit bodily mark in monoprint and lithograph. She performs the very distinction this paper argues. Two modes of artistic practice. One that tells through words. Another one that knows more than it can tell.
5. The Same Circuit, Different Electricity
To develop: approximately 200-250 words. Notes so far:
Where Kollwitz and Emin converge: both use the press as a site where conscious control gives way to embodied knowing. Both are women whose embodied experience is pressed into form through a historically male-dominated technical process.
Where they diverge: Kollwitz’s electricity is collective and political. Emin’s is autobiographical and confessional. But the mechanism is identical. The same inert conductors. The same removal of the delete button. The same live wire state necessary for conduction of tacit knowledge.
The print in both cases becomes what the worn banknote is. A token of humanity reaching humanity. A chain of human contact. The thing of value exchanged between people.
6. Conclusion
To develop: approximately 150-200 words. Notes so far:
The print is what remains after the electricity has passed through. After the body’s knowledge has been forced into permanent form by pressure, ink and paper.
Not a description of human experience. A transmission of it. Humanity reaching humanity across time.
Polanyi said we know more than we can tell. McGilchrist showed us which hemisphere holds that knowing. Printmaking is the technology that catches what language cannot hold and presses it into archival form.
Bibliography so far:
Polanyi, M. (1966) The Tacit Dimension. London: Routledge.
McGilchrist, I. (2009) The Master and His Emissary. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
McGilchrist, I. (2021) The Matter With Things. London: Perspectiva Press.
Fortnum, R. and Cockburn, C. (eds.) (2013) On Not Knowing: How Artists Think. London: Black Dog Publishing.
Kollwitz, K. The Diary and Letters of Kathe Kollwitz.