I'm in Pressing Matters!

I'm in Pressing Matters!

I'm chuffed to bits to share that I'm featured in Issue 35 of Pressing Matters magazine.

If you don't know it, Pressing Matters is a magazine made by printmakers, for printmakers. Inky fingers, sketchbooks, studios and works in progress... it's the kind of publication that gets into the actual process of making, not just the finished print. 

This issue looks at the power of printmaking to move people - stories of love, hope and justice sit alongside social pioneer Corita Kent and the wonderfully funny, emotive prints of Wuon-Gean Ho.

I'm sharing the pages with some brilliant company too - Anderson & Low, Joanne Bourne, Romson Regarde Bustillo, Kyungjoo Choi, Sebastián Curi, Diogo deCalle, La Maldita Estampa, Ross Loveday, Macarena Luzi, Pirrip Press, Mr Smith, Lisa Takahashi, Masha Titova and Wvjot - a proper international line-up of printmakers, all doing very different things with print.

A bit of what I shared

I talked a lot about how I got here - the print rooms at college, three foundation courses at three different colleges, and how education for me was never about qualifications, it was about staying in the room where things were being made. I found some collagraph work from my first foundation course back in 1992 recently and framed it on my wall... a reminder that this has always been part of who I am.

I spoke about why I love printmaking in particular, the slow methodical, process-led artform and there's a security in that structure, a scaffold that sets you free rather than constraining you. I've been using a quote from George Bodmer for years: “printmaking takes a perfectly simple process like drawing and makes it as complicated and error-prone as possible”. That's exactly the challenge that keeps me coming back.

I also got into the studio side of things - how everything starts with drawing, my love of charcoal and working big, and why I think of myself as an etcher even though most of my work is collagraph. And of course the birds... a lifelong love that started with binoculars and a walkman as a kid, and why I keep coming back to the birds people overlook, the starlings and sparrows, rather than anything more exotic.

The bit that mattered most to say was this: underneath all the talk of surface and texture, it's simply the act of making that drives me. The doing is the thing.

Issue 35 is a 100-page perfect bound publication, printed by Buxton Press, with a run of 4,500 copies. You can pick up a single copy here: pressingmattersmag.com/issue-35

Huge thanks to the Pressing Matters team for having me.