Bullen’s research underpinning Full Stop, Printer Drawings: Colour as readymade complements his visual and aural investigations in Chromatic Fields, examining how colour is perceived, and how perceptions and experience of colour might be mechanically manipulated by blurring the boundaries between drawing and printmaking, and between digital and material modes of production.
As implied by its title, this body of work was constructed using the full stop button on a standard keyboard and the colour palette utilised in computer software packages. Through a systematic and iterative process of composition, Bullen aimed to utilise all the colours within a given digital palette, individually and equally, without preference or hierarchy. Replacing the fluctuations of human touch with the abstract precision of the digital mark, these works present the viewer with a limited and ordered colour palette designed to focus on the relationships between colour and visual perception in the printed form. They explore both the digital ‘readymade’ and entire colour systems that were previously impossible to achieve. Additionally, these works explore constructivist and systematised approaches to the construction of art, as seen in the work of Kenneth Martin’s Chance and Order series, François Morellet’s Random Distribution of 40,000 Squares Using the Odd and Even Numbers of a Telephone Directory, and Tim Head’s Dust Flowers.
Full Stop, Printer Drawings: Colour as readymade comprises 12 digital drawings. An additional print was realised in letterpress from a digital file, as part of ‘Parallel Prints’, featuring a portfolio of 12 artists and initiated by Art at Wharepuke, New Zealand. The portfolio was acquired by the V&A, London; the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; Kent Print Collection; Whangarei Art Museum, Northland, New Zealand; and Nanjing Art Gallery, China. It was also exhibited and discussed at ‘Impact 8 International Printmaking Conference 2013 (Dundee) and galleries nationally and internationally.