Rise, seven colour screen print, created for the Eye Candy exhibition at the Rabbet gallery in Peckham, printed at Sonsoles print studio. The print was inspired by a collage made from found materials that I made earlier in the year while on holiday in France, and by my aerialist daughter Jo.
The quote is from a poem Acrobat by Bengali poet Nabaneeta Dev Sen:
And she would glide, so smooth, along the tightrope,
She thought she could do absolutely anything at all.
Blackberry pink, seven colour screen print. The colours are intuitive, the print dictates what colours to use. Composed of sponge marks and brush marks. Part of a series of four prints.
Seven colour screen print composed of thick and thin brush strokes and sponge marks. Windows of transparent colour to view the layer beneath.
Some images showing process and colour mixing. Printed at the wonderful Sonsoles in Peckham as always.
Seven colour screen print, continuing the theme of playing with transparent and opaque colours. Starting to build a core colour palette for my prints but wanting to introduce new colours while maintaining a harmony.
First screen print of 2024. Six colours, using brush strokes and sponge marks. I wanted to experiment with transparency and opacity.
Print triptych for 2024.
Six colour silkscreen print inspired by a found photograph from a Parisian flea market and overheard conversation in Horniman park. This way she says back to the house, remember.
Communication between a Mother and her daughter, a fleeting moment but significant to me as I overhear it. Marks from laser cut lettering and distressed text with extraneous marks from a gel plate print.
I will ask my neighbour for water, a series of nine colour screen prints. The series was inspired by a collage created in a mixed media and collage class at City Lit with Ruth Franklin. The collage came about through not thinking, the screen prints were very much thought about for months and went through a number of changes in Photoshop.
The words come from a found haiku by Chiyo-ni:
A morning glory
Twined round the bucket:
I will ask my neighbour for water
The original collage, a study in not thinking.
A continuation of the series.
Lime green tangerine, five colour screen print on 310gsm Southbank smooth.
Dirty orange pink, six colour screen print on 300gsm Somerset satin.
Burnt red blue, five colour silkscreen print, printed on 300gsm Somerset satin white.
Raspberry blue olive green, seven colour screen print, printed on 300gsm Somerset satin white.
Indigo magenta, seven colour screenprint, printed on 300gsm Somerset satin white.
Indigo magenta alternate, seven colour screenprint, printed on 300gsm Somerset satin white.
Colour triptych
How each layer is built. Slowly with care and focus.
The silkscreen process. The exposed screen is taped up and secured onto the press. All edges are taped to avoid any unwanted ink onto the paper. Beautiful raspberry blue waiting to be printed.
The starting point for my silkscreen prints, acrylic brush marks, oil pastel scribbles and drawn line images. The marks are random and often I don’t know how these will work together. The marks are scanned and then brought into photoshop. I will spend hours arranging and re arranging them until they click together. Colour is really important in my prints so I spend time making sure that the colours harmonise. I create a colour visual that I will use as a guide when mixing the colours. The next step is to isolate each layer that is to be used in the print, clean them up and then send off for acetates.
Woman and child silkscreen print series. I accidentally placed one acetate over the other one creating a band. I loved the band! It brought to mind interference on an analog television, remember those when we used to have three channels and no remote control? The picture would start to slip upwards leaving a band across the screen and a adult would need to go and twiddle a knob at the back of the set to adjust the vertical hold.
Vertical hold also brings to mind the mother/daughter relationship, complex emotions, love, frustration, misunderstandings sometimes. The hold a mother has over her daughter and the daughter over the mother.
The images are experiments and work in progress. Some time was spent manipulating the photographs in Photoshop to get the right balance and then the images were saved as halftone bitmaps, at 45 degrees and 40 lines per inch.
Background layers, on the left charcoal on tru grain exposed on the light unit at 20 units, under exposed to capture the grey areas of the charcoal. On the right oil pastel on tru grain exposed at 22 units.
The original photographs.
Abstract screenprints produced in Ann Norfield’s class at East London Printmakers. Using colour blends, stencils, painting directly onto the screen with a paint brush and opaque marks drawn and painted onto tru grain acetate with posca pens, oil pastel and ink.
High contrast face manipulated with levels in Photoshop to create a black and white image without grey areas. The photocopy is painted with cooking oil to make it transparent before exposing on the light unit. The face overprints a sunflower stencil.
Second screenprint in the series inspired by found objects and quotes from Alice through the Looking Glass.
She thought she would try the plan, this time, of walking in the opposite direction.
Alice through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
Six colour screen print depicting the circuitous route from childhood to adulthood. I was fortunate enough to visit Paris again in March 2022 and go to the flea market where there is a fantastic stall selling black and white photographs. Really excited to find the little boy on the phone, I felt it was perfect for this print.
I had been investigating the relationship of found images relating to the specific photographs. I see the objects as talismans that guide us on our tricky journey.
During Sue Baker Kentons class Develop your voice, I began investigating Alice in Wonderland and how I could use quotes from the book in my prints. I felt particularly inspired after finding a blue rabbit in a charity shop.
This silkscreen print will become part of a triptych which is currently in progress. The prints are produced at Sonsoles print studio in Peckham.
Would you tell me please, which way I ought to go from here
Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Silkscreen prints based on dreams, escape, sunflowers. Created using layers of charcoal drawings, found images from flea markets and ebay, painted marks and sunflowers that my neighbours planted in the front garden. Printed using 90 and 120 thread screens at Sonsoles print studio in Peckham.
Ideas for synonyms and antonyms taken from the quote I used in the narrative text book. Printed using a gel plate.
Synonyms: Salvaged, preserved, retrieved. Change, transform, metamorphoses. Photograph, image, record.
Antonyms: Remains, whole, complete. Ordinary, strange, different. Meaning, trivial, irrelevant.
Thanks to Sue Baker Kenton for the inspiration from her Tuesday evening class, Develop your voice.
Cyanotype concertina book, responding to a narrative text from The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. The images were created using a found image of a woman’s face, the text was added in photoshop, the image and text were printed out. The image was then dragged along the scanner to create a distortion on the text.
“Perhaps it’s true that things can change in a day. That a few dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetimes. And that when they do, those few dozen hours, like the salvaged remains of a burned house – the charred clock, the singed photograph, the scorched furniture – must be resurrected from the ruins and examined. Preserved. Accounted for.
Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly they become the bleached bones of a story.”
The back of the book was printed using a gel plate.
Seven colour silk screen print. Printed at Sonsoles in Peckham, still dreaming.
Wonderful class at City lit as usual and good to be in a class where fellow students are working on many different techniques, I found this inspiring.
Learning points for me, important to work out all the colours before starting to print. See how the colours work together and do a visual with the colours overlaid to check the opacity. The background image should be more visible, the image of the mother should be clearly seen behind the girl’s head.
Follow the photoshop visual for placing of overlaid images. For example the painted swirl should be lower down so that the eye of the girl is visible.
There were some issues with registration but after talking to Sue, she suggested moving the acetate forwards from the edge of the desk. This helped a lot as it meant that the acetate didn’t keep shifting when I was trying to register the colours.
My intention is to create a series of three screenprints on the theme of sleep, dreams and sunflowers. I’ve bought my own screen and waiting on delivery of an A1 portfolio.
Screen print completed today, 2nd September 2021 at Sonsoles in Peckham. The idea is based around sitting in the Horniman museum gardens and just looking at what’s in front of me. The image is of a photograph of a young girl that I bought in a flea market in Paris some years ago.
This took a few weeks to complete and there were a number of issues with the printing especially with the pink halftone.
The first two layers printed relatively easily although there were some registrations issues. I had put registration marks onto the acetates but they were too fine and didn’t show up. I will place the registration marks at the top and bottom of the image next time and make them a bit thicker.
After exposing the acetate for the pink halftone layer and printing this onto newsprint I noticed that there was a mark in the hair area of the image. This would show up on each print. I decided to strip the image down and start again. After re coating the screen and trying the printing of the halftone again, the ink appeared to be too thin and wasn’t covering over the grey image in the background. I bought some magenta ink from Sonsoles and mixed it with my colour to make it more powerful.
After re coating the screen and beginning to reprint the pink halftone I found that the screen hadn’t been washed out enough. Not all of the halftone was visible. The screen needed to be washed out with the high pressure jet to expose all of the fine halftone.
Starting the printing again the ink began to dry on the screen. I needed to add some extra screen print medium to the ink, wash the screen down on the press and start again.
Onto the final dark blue layer which went fairly easily. The main thing I learnt from these sessions is that you need patience and time when screen printing!
Cover and page images produced for an artist book part of the Advanced printmaking course at City lit in 2020/2021. The cover is perspex and was baked in the oven to produce bubbles. The binding is plastic tubing mimicking the tubing from a spacesuit.
The book is a combination of a number of different print techniques. The cover is a photo litho image. Within the book there are silkscreen prints, cyanotypes, etched lino prints overprinted with wooden type. The quotes are printed on a gel plate.
The book is Inspired by a novel, Solaris written by Stanislaw Lem and the 1972 Russian film directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. The story is about a psychologist Kris Kelvin, who arrives at a space station to investigate what is happening to a group of scientists who are conducting scientific experiments using radiation, on the planet Solaris. The crew are being haunted by hallucinations or apparations from their former lives and imagination.
“Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed.”
From Solaris by Stanislaw Lem
Shortly after Kris arrives on the space station he begins to have visitations and sees a copy of his wife Rheya. Rheya had previously committed suicide after Kris had left her. Kris believes at first that he is dreaming but after the other crew members can aslo see his wife he realises she is actually there.
I was particularly interested in this story as it’s a continuation on a theme I started to work on last year about memory and hallucination. Do we ever lose people close to us when they pass away or are they always with us embedded in our consciousness?
An object, place, moment in time, a fragment of music or bird call can bring back a memory or thought about the person who isn’t with us anymore. The person need not be dead for a sensory stimulation to create a visitation of their being in our minds. It’s a yearning to be with the loved person, to hear them speak to touch them and share a joke with them again.
“We’re not searching for anything except people. We don’t need other worlds. We need mirrors.”
From Solaris by Stanislaw Lem
One and two colour photo litho prints produced in David Holah’s class at City Lit. The artwork was inspired by a pair of found children’s shoes on a wall in Forest Hill near to the Horniman museum. I created a montage from found photographs, mono prints taken from photographs and text which came into my head inspired by the shoes. I manipulated the images in Photoshop to create a composite. The composite was then saved as a tiff to compress the layers. The tiff was saved as a bitmap file, first as a halftone image with 30 dots per inch.
After printing this out as an acetate and exposing it on the light unit and printing a test strip, I decided that the image was looking too coarse. I then resaved the image as a halftone at 70 dpi. This worked much better and created a more refined image.
The photo litho plate was placed face down onto the acetate on the light unit. The above prints were exposed at 2H (half light), this seemed to work well. A test strip was exposed first to make sure the exposure time is correct. The plate size should be larger than the image. The plate was developed in Hunter Penrose plate developer in a dilution of 1:8 with water for approximately 5-10 seconds. The plate was wiped gently to remove any unexposed emulsion. The plate was rinsed in water and dried with a hair dryer. A thin layer of gum arabic was added and allowed to dry.
Inking the plate
A container of clean water and sponge was prepared. Oil based relief ink was rolled up on the bench. Some water was applied to the bench beneath the plate to keep it in place. The plate was wiped with a damped sponge. A thin layer of ink was applied to the plate with a small roller. The process was then repeated building up the ink on the plate. The plate was then printed onto damp paper. Extra sheets of paper were place on top of the blankets to bulk up the pressure on the plate.
Four colour screen print, yellow as the first colour, silver grey as the second, orange red as the third and the final colour dark blue.
The original found photograph, charcoal drawing printed as silver in the second layer and the hand drawn lettering done with a paintbrush.
Experimenting with one colour halftone prints and a gradation at Sonsoles in Peckham. The inspiration coming from my found Paris photographs and the text resulting from an afternoon sitting in the sun in Horniman park. What started as a one colour print led me to overprint a previous silkscreen, the yellow lettering and silver background showing through.
Responding to David Holah’s paper bag project at City Lit. The inspiration comes from a mask series by Saul Steinberg and Inge Morath www.magnumphotos.com/arts-culture/art/inge-morath-saul-steinberg-masks/
The intention is to create a new identity or an alternative persona. I’m intrigued to find out if I feel differently wearing the disguise when I go out into the world.
I have a series of photographs that I bought in a Paris flea market a couple of years ago. Often wondering who the people were and what their stories are, I used them as a basis for this project. The head and arm covering have a French look and feel. The arm covering is my interpretation of a famous building in Paris.
This book was produced during the Coronavirus pandemic in 2021 as part of the Advanced Printmaking course at City Lit. During lockdown the students were not able to use the studio at CityLit so techniques were used that were possible to do at home without a printing press.
Inspiration came from the book Solaris written by Stanislaw Lem and the 1972 Russian film directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. The story is about a psychologist Kris Kelvin who arrives at a space station to investigate what is happening to a group of scientists who are conducting scientific experiments using radiation, on the planet Solaris. The crew are being haunted by hallucinations or apparations from their former lives and imagination.
Shortly after Kris arrives on the space station he begins to have visitations and sees a copy of his wife Rheya. Rheya had previously committed suicide after Kelvin had left her. Kris believes at first that he is dreaming but after the other crew members can aslo see his wife he realises she is actually there.
The book is a continuation on a theme that was worked on last year about memory and hallucination. Do we ever lose people close to us when they pass away or are they always with us embedded in our consciousness? What is real and what isn’t?
An object, place, moment in time, a fragment of music or bird call can bring back a memory or thought about the person who isn’t with us. The person need not be dead for a sensory stimulation to create a visitation of their being in our minds. It’s a yearning to be with the loved person, to hear them speak to touch them and share a joke with them again.
The lino block was etched using caustic soda. The caustic soda is added to water and dissolved before adding wall paper paste.
A reversed image was drawn onto the lino, then a resist was used to stop out areas on the lino. The resist could be oil pastel or vaseline for a soft edge, vaseline appears to work better as a resist, the oil pastel giving a more subtle image. The wall paper paste mixture is then painted onto the lino.
The bite time should be between 30 minutes and one hour. The longer bite time the lighter the tone. Remove the excess with newspaper and then wash the plate in water and dry before printing.
The lino was rotated to give a softer feel, the stencil printed over the top. Two circular pieces of lino were added in blue and red. Wood letters were printed in oil paint as the final layer.
Frottage images produced using stencils, corrugated cardboard, and wood letters. A graphite stick, black oil pastels were used to make the marks. The letters were printed with red oil paint.
Image one, representational. Image two using one line without taking the pencil from the paper. Image 3, using two pens strapped together. Image 4 drawn with eyes closed. Image 5, drawn with both right and left hands at the same time. Image 6 drawn with a stencil. Image 7 inspired by book page image, using stencil.
In the beginning
As a five year old child a book was a complex set of hieroglyphics to be deciphered by my immature brain. When I finally began to read I realised that the book I’d been given as my school reader was incredibly boring and obviously could be much improved by my customisation. The book becomes something personal with added human intervention. Wether it’s a note written in the margin, childish scribble, or deliberate defacing of a book for example by Joe Orton. The age of a book matters, it degrades with time, the paper yellows and becomes spotted but sometimes it’s impossible to discard because of the history that it holds. The childhood book acts as a coded message or a portal in the memory to take myself back in time.
My Mother read to us continually, as a child it was always a comfort to hear a human voice reading from a favourite book at bedtime or when lying ill in bed. One of the few highly coloured children’s books that I still own, the acid yellow and reds in a book about a naughty child still appeals.
Fantasy can invade your imagination. After reading Phillip Pulman’s His Dark Materials, while daydreaming on the P4 bus travelling to Brixton, I imagined I could see people’s daemons on their shoulders. Being lost in a book while travelling means forgetting where you are in time and space. Reading a book is immersing yourself in someone else’s life and escaping from day to day reality. I can live vicariously with a hard boiled Edinburgh detective on the trail of drug dealers. My life may not be so dramatic but I can delve into the lives of fictional characters for some dangerous living.
Visiting a bookshop, I feel like a child in a sweet shop. So many images, ideas and explosions of colour and type. I am particularly drawn to book covers, a designers representation of the inner imaginings of the author. I often do judge a book by it’s cover, if something is imaginatively designed I am quite likely to buy it. One favourite is Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things, the blue and silver indented swirls give the cover an other worldly feel, reminiscent of other planets. A book’s tactile quality is important, the weight of it, the paper it’s printed on, the smell of the ink.
Art and design reference books are a constant source of inspiration. Getting energy from other people’s work and seeing how designers and artists have broken the rules to create something unique and different from the norm, gives me the motivation to try something new.
Dissension, protest and non conformism can originate from a book. Books can be a powerful medium to spread ideas.
During lockdown the acquisition of books has begun to feel illicit. To get a book from the library it must be ordered first, await its arrival and then visit the library only on a particular couple of days. The entrance is at the back of the building, you must wear a mask to enter. The masked librarian sits behind a desk and points to the shelf where your book awaits wrapped in paper, an elastic band around it and the code written down the spine. Once read the book is then posted back through the letterbox of the library door, there’s something of a secret society about it.
