New work and Texas

I’ve been invited to work at Flatbed Press in Austin, Texas for a month in June. http://www.flatbedpress.com/

Incredible as this sounds – it’s true and is a connection that has grown out of a visit to Austin in 2013  when I met with students and staff at the University of Texas faculty of arts and education. I’ve applied for an Arts Council / British Council travel award to develop the connection into an exchange between Flatbed and Double Elephant and other print workshops across the UK.  The idea is to open opportunities for artists to exchange with Flatbed and vice versa. I hope to travel to Austin and work with their Master printers to develop and co-publish an edition of my work. Watch this space for more news on that.

In the meantime, I’m working here in my studio so I can hit the ground running if and when I get to Austin. I’m continuing to make monoprints but am making it hard for myself in using the largest paper size I can manage on the press and I’m making bleed prints – right up to the edge of the paper. I suppose this encourages my usual painterly – or rough approach to printmaking. Printing several layers of heavy ink from MDF plates is difficult on this scale and so the work has a non print look to it I think – more like a flat painting but clearly made fom cut printed sections.

I made this one :

and it started me in the right direction – to make something that for me generates emotion. I want them to almost ache – to emote, to make me feel melancholy, loss, that something is missing. I thnk they follow on from the work made in relation to dementia and I hope they are unsettling. These next 2 pieces make more sense in this regard I think –

It’s not that easy to see them from these small images or get a sense of the vibrancy of colour but hopefully the form is clear.  They are all 90 x 64 cm. They show imagined spaces – spaces that don’t really ‘work’ – almost blind alleys. My thought is that they could be landscapes or interiors from inside the mind.