For the series The Press of My Hands Sally Warren focuses her digital printmaking practice on material transformation, using a newly developed inkjet transfer process that employs her hands for mark-making and pressure. Triggered by the denied losses of the COVID-19 period, the work refers to the virtuality and transience of contemporary shared experience.

Warren often appropriates online images as her primary source. For this series, she drew from collected documentary photographs of cities ravaged by war or natural disaster. From the safety of a laptop, these images of distant catastrophes may seem remote and unreal, yet they describe histories that victims must live with. For the news consumer, such distressing events fade quickly into the past, continually replaced by fresh disasters.

Wanting to validate a reality, and perhaps to mourn, the artist turned to these archived records of unfelt losses. Each selected image was considered at length. Its coherence as a news photograph had to be opened up to new interpretations. Looking for a metaphoric bridge between virtual and material, the artist developed a new process to transfer digital images to paper by hand.