A visit to Printtfest in Ulverston recently made a huge impact on me. It was a wonderful opportunity to talk to the artists, who were keen to engage and shared their practice enthusiastically. Many seemed to be my age and had taught themselves to print, by attending workshops and reading books, they were all very proficient and professional.
I came away feeling that I would like to try lots of these processes, the whole thing was so inspiring and they were some excellent artists there.
Personal Favourites
There was lots of etching that was impressive:
Fouzia Zafar builds collages and presses them into soft ground and then etches. There were some very large pieces which were dark and atmospheric.
Isobel Walker - made large circles using sugar lift and embossing.
Jude Freeman very delicate etchings of flowers.
Kelly Stewart made painterly screenprints that were printed in several layers by working onto different types of film, each layer exposed onto different areas of the screen. When each layer was printed it was a different colour and there could be 20-30 layers.
There were two collagraph artists that impressed me.
Jay Seabrook who uses mounting card and Carborundum.
Sue Brown makes shaped collagraphs using skim and repair from B&Q! She presses stencils into it and allows it to dry and then prints from it.
I have tried out some of these collagraph methods and have been pleased with the results.
I was also very taken with the artists that carved into Japanese Plywood.
Debby Akam cut into Japanese ply and made patterns and shapes which she overlaid with very bright colours.
Joanna Bourne worked in a similar way to construct figurative images of landscape and animals in landscape, printing onto Japanese paper.
The talk that we went to was by Joanna Bourne, she works in Newcastle upon Tyne and is inspired by what she sees around her making woodcuts on either plywood or Japanese plywood. She showed how she prints her work using a makeshift frame, a "barren" and the back of a wooden spoon! I found it very confirming, as she said that she had stopped making artwork whilst her kids were growing up and had come back to it over the last seven years (which is of course what I have done and often feel awkward about it). She talked in a very matter-of-fact way, about how she takes wood out of skips to work with and to make do and mend. She is more concerned about her practice and making the best of it rather than having to conform to expectations.
It was lovely to have the opportunity to see all this work and meet like minded people. I could see that there were several possibilities to develop my own practice and so I've begun with the collagraphs and also signed up to a Japanese Plywood workshop too!
