Since 2024 I have been exploring printmaking at Seacourt Print Workshop.
Funded by Ards & North Down Borough Council, I began with screen printing then more recently have completed both the beginners and advanced copper plate etching courses.
Why are you doing that? I hear you ask. Since I began focusing on drawing as the source of my studio artworks, I often circle back to the initial drawings being my favourite thing of all.
Printmaking offers a way to not only create drawings in a more versatile, hands-on way, with the flexibility that different techniques afford, but also to create them in a reproducible format.
Having recently completed the training, I now hope to experiment with making the print plates in situ, and/or embellishing prints & incorporating them in to mixed media work.
The theme of prints ties in to my motherhood places project. Realising that my work's focus has shifted from "landscapes" to "places", it has released me from trying to fit in to the wrong box and I have been wanting to explore elements of places we pause in task, such as toys, furniture, playparks, as well as our most-visited vistas.
Inheritance
Copper etching of my old Transformer, which I got in 1988 having had my tonsils out in hospital. I have so many memories of playing with this then I assumed it was lost.
It recently resurfaced when clearing a box of childhood things kept aside by my folks, ahead of them selling their house.
I gave it to my 5 year old, about the same age as I received it, who is a Transformers fan and is so delighted with it.
It feels like a new part of motherhood, him being old enough for me to pass things down to him.
Everybody's Legs
Screen print of our dining table chairs. I've always found them so cheerful! When we moved to Bangor it was from a one--communal-roomed narrow house where we had a tiny, uncomfortable, awkwardly placed table.
One of the biggest joys in the new house was to give over a big chunk of living space to a full size table and chairs.
Everybody's legs came about because with my partner being on permanent night shift, I can't generally go out after kids bedtime and the living room therefore is one of my "motherhood places" spent in lieu of studio time. I chose these as the representative view of it. Also, to convey the joy that I get from the gaggle of tangled chair legs and how everyone we love now regularly has their legs under the table for family occasions.
Still Here
There's a caravan/country park in Aberdeenshire that my grandparents used to run, then live near, and it is SO representative of our childhoods.
Now they're unfortunately gone, but we took a family camping trip there last year. The playparks are in a giant field, and it turns out that they just build new ones next to each other, only removing broken items. This one survives from the 90s, we all played on it and now our kids have too.
Ballyholme Beach
We just spend so much time here. Since we moved to Bangor and didn't have much in the way of preschool childcare options, it was down to the beach most days, at least a few times per week.
Slightly less frequently now, but still often. A true marker of his childhood, I can't help but imagine him here with his friends as he gets older, maybe he'll try sailing, foiling, who knows. We'll be here anyway.
Memory Mapping
A technique I love, especially when I don't know what to make. Just let a line wander over a journey, from memory. Add some messages, print layers over. Bin it, keep it, make something else from it.
Monoprinting with gelli plates in the studio.
