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EDINBURGH PRINTMAKERS Four artists from Swansea Print Workshop and four artists from Edinburgh Printmakers have been selected to take part in a 10 days Artist Residency as part of an artist exchange between the two Print Workshops. This cultural exchange will support the professional and practical development of the eight artists and allow each one to establish connections and challenge perspectives within the theme Import/Export as they take an individual approach to the culture of the visited city. Working in the technique or techniques of their choosing, the artists have expressed their interest in diverse subjects such as the migration of people, the importation of flora to exploring the natural and corporate landscapes of the cities. At Edinburgh Printmakers The artists from Swansea will be in residence at Edinburgh from Sunday 15 May until Thursday 26 May. They will be welcomed at Edinburgh Printmakers on Monday 16 May where they will take part in an induction day. Following that the artists will be working with technical support from print specialists Gillian Murray and Bronwen Sleigh. There will be a social evening on Thursday 19th May at 6.30 p.m. for all members of Edinburgh Printmakers and the visiting artists to meet and talk about their work. At Swansea Print Workshop The artists visiting from Edinburgh will be in residence at Swansea Print Workshop from Sunday 29 May until Wednesday 8 June. SPW are delighted to welcome back Liz Jackson, a previous artist in residence at the Workshop who will be providing the technical induction on Monday 30 May and technical support to the artists throughout their stay. Liz’s artwork is of an extremely high standard of professionalism and SPW feel confident that she will enhance the visiting artists experience of the residency. There will be a social evening on Tuesday 31 May at 6.30 p.m. for all members of Swansea Print Workshop and the visiting artists to meet and talk about their work. Import/Export Exhibition The work created during the project will be exhibited in The Drawing Room at Swansea Print Workshop from 9 August until 1 September. The private view will be on Tuesday 9 August from 6.30 p.m. onwards The exhibition will then travel to Edinburgh Printmakers where it will be exhibited from 8-24 September. Swansea Artists... Susan Adams I studied Fine Art at Norwich and the Slade Schools of Art and later gained an MA in Electronic Arts at Middlesex University. I exhibit internationally and have held a number of prestigious Artist in Residency positions including those at Gloucester Cathedral, Millay Colony for the Arts New York, Welsh National Opera, Bardsey Island and Shaftesbury Abbey. I use a range of media including printmaking, painting, polychromed wood and video. The imagery explores the relationship between fantasy and lived experience and the locations in which these two worlds collide. I am interested in the uncanny, the half-alive as manifest in objects like puppets, automatons, sites in which the mechanical and the organic find an uneasy relationship. For the exchange with Edinburgh Printmakers I shall be building on recent imagery developed for my major solo exhibition at MOMA Wales There are Receivers in the Woods. I began to explore our relationship with wireless technologies, finding a visual parallel with the hermit saint in isolation looking to the sky for special knowledge. I am fascinated with the subterranean area of Edinburgh which was inhabited by the very poorest during the industrial revolution. Somehow I would like to work that into the imagery, especially as the gap between the haves and the have-nots is widening rapidly at the moment; an important theme in much science-fiction is the forgotten underclass living almost like animals. I shall be working with etching techniques, principally acrylic resist, alternative etching and photo etching during the exchange.
< top Bill Chambers I am interested in new technologies and how these can be integrated into existing printmaking processes. My work reflects many influences, not least of which is my association with India, Rajasthan and my continuing engagement with the world of textile design and printing. The prints that I make and my job as a teacher of printmaking skirt the realms of craft, technology and fine art in equal measure. This year I have been given an Arts Council of Wales Creative Wales Award. The project will involve experimenting with new media by working in collaboration with staff of the Contemporary Textiles Course at UWIC. The intention is to create new works by experimenting with digital stitch, laser cutting and digital print in conjunction with existing processes. This project is based on the architecture and urban environment of Newport and will culminate in a catalogue and exhibition at the Riverfront Arts Centre in Newport. I am fascinated by all aspects of architecture and the inner city, so it will be hugely exciting for me to explore the many sides of Edinburgh. I hope to discover places and buildings that reflect the theme of the project so will begin by looking at the harbour and evidence of Edinburgh’s industrial past. I am also interested in the corporate side of the capital and will be seeking out buildings and interiors that stand for the city’s business and financial life. The chance to make work at the Edinburgh Print Workshop is a privilege and a huge opportunity. I look forward to being introduced to this highly regarded centre for print and can hardly wait to start.
< top Michael Goode I studied 3D Design (Ceramics/Furniture) at Edinburgh College of Art graduating in 1990. During my four years in Edinburgh I attended various courses in printmaking at Edinburgh Printmakers and subsequently joined the organisation. I continued my interest in painting and printmaking on my return to Wales and became member of VOGA (Vale of Glamorgan Artists) and Cardiff Print Workshop. I joined Swansea Print Workshop in 2009 and I am a member of the Exhibitions Group. I am particularly interested in architecture, nature, and advertising and specialise in screenprinting, collagraph and linocut. I have shown in a number of galleries in Wales including St. David's Hall, Victoria Fearn Gallery and the National Eisteddfod. I will take this opportunity to visit the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh to create work with a focus on the natural environment of plants, trees and flowers combined with a study of the glasshouses that contain the plants. I hope to spend time drawing and photographing the various plants and greenhouses and even creating work onsite. I would like to study the plants shape, texture and colour and explore their relationship with the architectural features of the glasshouses, palm houses and other buildings in the garden. I am interested in how plants from across the world have been imported and exported between different countries and national plant collections and will investigate the origins of the plants and how they arrived at the Royal Botanic Garden since the early 19th Century through the endeavours of plant collectors, conservationists and plant specialists for research purposes and to add to the existing collection. I would like to use collagraph techniques to create a series of large scale pictures, using line and texture. I would also like to create a series of small two / three colour screenprints of individual plants and flowers that would show the vibrant colours, shapes and patterns of the exotic plants and flowers.
< top Robert Macdonald Before I was able to go to art college I had an earlier career in journalism, and I began my working life on a small country newspaper in New Zealand. I spent my first year pulling and reading galley proofs, writing articles, wrapping up newspapers and sweeping up lead dust surrounded by presses and linotype machines and ink-stained printers. The process of printing fascinated me and it was natural that when, eventually, I left New Zealand and enrolled as an art student at the Central School of Art in London, that I should find myself most at home in the etching and blockprinting workshops at the Central. Merlyn Evans was in charge of etching and the approach of his department was deeply influenced by the ideas of his friend Stanley William Hayter. In my year at the Central I began showing etchings in the St. George Gallery, Cork Street, and was represented in the first printmaking exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery. Although my lack of finances forced me back to journalism I returned to the Central School printmaking workshop whenever I could save up enough cash to give up regular work. As a very mature student I was able to take a diploma in advanced printmaking studies at the Central in the early 1980s, and although after moving to Wales in 1989 my special interest in printmaking had for a time to be abandoned, it has begun to blossom again since I discovered in Wales the resources of the Swansea Print Workshop. My own personal background leads me directly to a possible area of visual exploration to fit in with the project – IMPORT/EXPORT. I would like to focus on the idea of the import and export of people, as historically political and social upheaval and migration have affected both Scotland and Wales, Edinburgh and Swansea (and been the major shaping influence in my own family history). As my name indicates, my family background on my father’s side was strongly Scottish and my paternal grandmother was a native Gaelic speaker from the Isle of Lewis. However I grew up from the age of 10 in the far north of New Zealand, living in a farming community established in the 19th century by Highland Scots who travelled to New Zealand in a fleet of six sailing ships from Nova Scotia. Known as the Waipu settlers, many of the founders of this settlement were refugees from the Highland Clearances. My paternal grandfather was born in Southern Ireland and his family claimed descent from Jacobite Macdonalds who fled to Ireland after the battle of Culloden. My mother was a South African whose parents travelled in ox wagons when young from the Eastern Cape to settle in the Transvaal. Movement, travel and upheaval are etched deeply into my own consciousness and I would hope to reflect this in my work – in a series of prints combining people, landscape and a sense of journeying.
< top Edinburgh Artists... John Heywood BA Hons I have been a member of Edinburgh Printmakers since the mid-80s and worked almost exclusively in Etching. We used traditional methods for a number of years before progressing to safe etching techniques 15 or so years ago. My work has been influenced by this process and I have moved from drawing directly onto the plate to currently using a combination of photo etching and drawing through a ground. I am currently interested in drawing directly from life and then converting this into an etching via the photec process. My work has always been drawing based. I like to capture an atmosphere in the image and re-create a time of day or a moment in time. This helps the viewer connect with the work and makes for a shared experience. A work which has always stuck in my mind was a small oil painting by Corot of a farmer driving some cows from a field in the early morning; I think it was called “early morning”. He simply managed to capture a moment in time some 150 years ago and you are there with him. That is what I aspire to in my work
< top Ruth Nay Drawing is fundamental to any work that I do. I generally find somewhere to draw and return to a few sites over a long period of time. The act of being situated allows me to make drawings , prints and paintings . I also enjoy the layering of images , being situated outside, returning to same place to further notice and go deeper with my noticing. I think I am trying to understand through drawing initially then in making paintings there is a stage where the painting itself takes over and everything one knows is not enough. Somehow this is the crux of my creative practice and an aspect I would like to explore further Throughout my development as an artist I have become very enchanted with the act the possibilities intrinsic in the material itself. My area of experiment concerns the ability of the material itself , both to be controlled and the complete preposterousness of trying to control inert substances to represent living experience. I enjoy the spillages , accidents and interruptions that often are openings to another way of understanding and creating images. I am interested in different processes and the opportunities inherent in etching , screenprinting etc for making creative decisions whilst working on an image. I enjoy the play between what is observed and hard won through constant looking and the abstraction that seems to lie underneath the surface. I based my application about coming to respond to a particular place through drawing as impetus for new work including elements of screen printing and etching . I would like to base my response to the act of travelling to a place everyday to make works . part of my ideas would be to establish a dialogue between my work and that of the other artists there . This may be accomplished by drawing on the same site , going for field trips to notice things . I would like to work really hard on drawing directly onto plates perhaps working on dry point outside , making mono- prints, and also the gestural qualities of screen print in as a basis for the next days work . I imagine I will be very excited by seeing new places and am already looking at maps and wondering what it will look like , what it will be like. I got quite excited last night about Neath sounding like Leith and being docks and about the same distance as Edinburgh docks are from the Centre of Edinburgh. I kept thinking about duality and what it could mean. One of the ideas I find most interesting is interrupting drawings but also how interruptions are new points of departure .
< top Kelly Stewart With a passion for traditional European architecture I have been inspired to visit and draw many cities throughout Europe. I have focused on the style, shape and intricacies of the buildings to draw attention to it’s individual, unique and most beautiful qualities. I found I craved more of an organic line to draw and push the work to introduce abstract qualities as a way of loosening the line and the overall drawing. I began drawing animals and boats. Boats in particular feature organic forms in the bow, the ropes, the curve of the windows and safety rings to name a few. In terms of artistic development I am always looking to loosen my drawing style whether it be through the medium or the subject matter. Drawing and printmaking is the inspiration and essence of my work. I start with a drawing and develop it through a series of layers in the silkscreen print process. The layers can consist of textures, handwritten text, computer text or graphic patterns. My layering process involves up to 20+ different transparencies which are mostly hand generated and then overlaid via silkscreen. In recent years I have shifted my focus from the drawing component to the actual printmaking process and the mark making it generates. Prints became a combination of drawing and abstract qualities. In this import/ export project I would like to produce a series of black and white drawings with an aim to producing a 5-6 colour print which involves drawing but with a greater significance to abstract, expressive qualities. This project will enable me to explore this concept of drawing organic forms into abstract mark making through the subject matter of boats. This will be a challenge by making a shift to a more abstract outcome.
< top Gill Tyson My main practice is in lithography, concentrating on the richness of expressive marks within this medium, which I often combine with screenprinting, building up layers of colour to create a depth and intensity in deceptively simple and distilled imagery. My work has been likened to “painting in slow motion”. I am drawn to remote, often bleak and harsh, environments - places as diverse as Orkney, The Lofoten Islands and the Namib Desert. I look for incidents of manmade presence in places that are in some ways inhospitable. It’s often a seemingly out of place marker in the landscape; a circus poster on a telegraph pole by the Arctic Sea, a kilometre marker in the Namib Desert. My last exhibition, called It’s The End Of The Road, was a series of images looking at places where the road runs out; a pier collapsed into the sea, a remote community on the west coast, an abandoned signal station in Donegal. I propose to respond to the sense of place in Swansea and the surrounding area, looking particularly at its relationship to the coast and the sea; Swansea and Edinburgh share a closeness to their respective coasts and it is this affinity I would like to explore. From Edinburgh you can quickly find yourself in deserted spots and the sea is ever present in the vistas seen from the centre of town or from one of the seven hills. The connection with its broader location influences and informs what it is like to live in a coastal city; it helps to put the preoccupations and distractions of city into context. I’m looking forward to exploring Swansea and the surrounding area, camera and sketchbook in hand, and returning to the studio to translate these impressions into, I hope, evocative images in print.
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