May contained more Art Fair admin and applications for other print fairs, but more excitingly it meant getting back in the studio and creating some new work! I had a piece to create for ‘Watersheds’ Exhibition, being held at the Storey gallery, artist were invited to create work based upon or inspired by the poetry of Tom Bowker – the exhibition being ran by his daughter Julie Evans. Happily for me he worked at the Williamsons site for a period and some of the poems related to his time there. I wanted to create an atmospheric monotype featuring great piles of coal as described in the poem ‘Our tip’. It was my first venture using metallic inks and is one of the bigger pieces I have attempted, pretty pleased with the end result! And it was lots of fun to create.
I also did some at home etching on aluminium for the first time ever! My confidence is really increasing with getting out there and trying things on my own, it went relatively smoothly… quite a fast etch but thankfully by now I knew what I was looking at and what to do about it! Progress, hurrah! This is another piece for the upcoming Williamsons Power Station exhibition, starting to get all the artworks together now. You will have to wait to see until next month what it prints like as I haven’t gotten on with it yet.
A whole two workshops this month thought, Woodcutting and Copper etching. I loved woodcutting, I just love those high contrast black and white images relief printing produces, again you will have to wait for photographic evidence of this one as we needed to saw the edges off the piece and I carved a bit more and I still need a final print. Copper etching was very interesting, I was amazed at the difference between the linework that you are able to achieve as opposed to aluminium etching! No aquatint so we couldn’t etch tone so I had to go all out on the line work on this one, reminded me a lot of fineliner drawing.
So excited about this exhibition now, titled ‘A recent history of Williamsons Power Station and showing at The Dukes, please come and visit if you are the the area!
