I have been passing a particular fence between Adelaide Botanic Garden and the Royal Adelaide Hospital for over a year. It seems like an acute frontier, separating life’s splendour from the world of feebleness, horridness and struggle. I always look for the signs of decay and weakness in this structure, and see them as threshold points, where merging is possible.

The work Tympan #4 (Unending) was developed from these kind of observed scars and refers to the notion of liminality as the representative of difference.

Jake Holmes is the co-founder of Tooth and Nail Studios. He most often works in screenprint as this allows him to create works that are accessible to a wide audience. His current works focus on political commentary and personal documentation, through screenprint, illustration, comics, audio and tattoos.

My work focuses on a continued investigation into the phenomenon of existence and the potential of ‘other’ realms.

By creating metaphysical landscapes that manifest purely out of manipulating ink and capturing them onto the delicate surface of paper, my understanding of being ephemeral creatures in a transient world is further reinforced through this practice.

It is true to say, that the only thing we can be most certain of is our impermanence... mind the portal.

The work Lifeafterlife is an artist’s book made from collaged discarded prints. It tells a cyclical story of ruin and renewal.

This set of three prints takes as its starting point Benjamin’s idea of a translation providing an afterlife for the original. Each print suggests the effect of some preceding action – what remains after a physical and/or emotional event, existing as documentation that keeps the memory of the original event alive.

The image and text of yesteryear, once signifying fleeting moments of optimism, have now been discarded, faded or forgotten with time. The graphic image that once promised us the world now helps form the ubiquitous skin on the neglected walls of city laneways and suburban streets; simultaneously symbolic of both progress and decay.

Printing from the ruined backs of old steel printing plates has made something new. The resulting random textures that have been created have been incorporated in the new prints. The idea of rebirth occurs to me as well as the reality of continual change.

Firestorm makes reference to the twice-sacked city of Magdeburg, once during the Protestant wars in 1631 and then in 1945 by Allied bombing.  Today it is the wrecking ball producing the towering hills of rubble as Communist Eastern Bloc buildings are erased from the landscape.

Rubble examines where in Syria, relentless bombardment creates mountains of rubble in the streets of the cities and towns.  This debris is brimming with memory and change - even new life is discovered here in the form of the chrysalises.

Somewhere between real time and remembered time, lies the subtle whisperings of what was, or could have been – the remnants – vestiges and traces – of the sum total of our activities in any one place. We humans embody the wonderful idealism and ruination of our passage. To me, this is what it is to be human: the layering of myth, memory and regret. Cavafy’s Ithaca spread wide.

Walter Benjamin suggests that only with ruination can an object’s truth be laid bare. The 2015 destruction of the Baalshamin Temple in Palmyra, Syria was felt as a shattering in the continuum of history. In truth, it is the next phase in a 2,000-year cycle of ruination and rebuilding – a human fight for permanence within a transient existence.

This work examines the final resting place for objects, which have been corroded, battered and changed through atmospheric oxidation but still contain traces of their origin and function. The resultant entity is stable but is transformed with layers of rust, verdigris and copper.

Plates made by me for demonstration of printmaking techniques to my students, often made spontaneously, sometimes with no resolved image, and may contain random marks from student experimentation, collected over several years are the basis for these two prints. The plates are lino, aluminium, copper, zinc and plastic printed both intaglio and relief, layered over and over each other, with the final block being a large and particularly damaged lino salvaged after spending multiple years on the bed of a working lithography press. The final addition is a fine sprinkling of silver pigment.

My work in Afterlife developed out of my 2014 Honours research, exploring the theme of Revenance, through the materiality of print media. Using a range of etching techniques, my prints attempt to capture the ephemeral quality of human entities, featured in The Revenant, Rider and Halo.