Sunnybank Mills Gallery

Dropped off new pieces of work yesterday at Sunnybank Mills Art Gallery in Leeds, it’s a great gallery and full of lovely gifts in the shop. There’s also a fantastic exhibition called the Potential of Pattern with some stunning contemporary art, textiles and sculpture.

My work will be in the gallery shop I have woodcut prints and some of my Back of the envelope pieces, which are fine art original hand drawn artworks on preloved paper…it’s a Preloved Paper Project People!

These drawings are hand drawn in my Manchester and Salford Based studios, my main working space upstairs at Hotbed Press in Salford and my home studio …at home in Manchester. Hotbed Press is a traditional printmaking studio and my art studio is a space above that, freezing cold in a victorian draughty space. Hotbed press the printmakers below is currently closed due to Covid19 restrictions and only open for educational purposes, hence me mostly working from my home studio it’s a messy business.

multiple

Sometimes larger pieces of work are made from multiple envelopes and bits of this and that, large collages with hand drawing maybe some print and use of thread. I have been meaning to photograph some of these works for sometime to share on my blog

The piece above is called Moths and depicts moths flying towards a lightbulb and ricocheting away, it’s made from old banking envelopes folded and some of them have print or drawing on, I’ve also used stitch in a rather chaotic way, I thought this suits the furtive scribbly nature of moths.

Some of the images above are from my Covid19 commission for Salford University Collections I’ve done so many drawings for this, finding inspiration as I go along and consequently sometimes changing my path at times I feel inspired but at other times I feel I just don’t when to stop!

Below is a drawing of a Murmuration on three envelopes as one piece of work, a Triptych. This is an ink drawing repetitively drawing birds over and over again

Below is a large collage called Joy this shows magpies in a nest made from ephemera with hand drawing and stitching

Repeat repeat repeat

Working on a series of editions at Hotbed Press. One off mono screen- prints, the results are experimental and inspired by my drawings.

Printing a few small marks over and over again to see what happens, each screen-print will (eventually) have an unruly shape on it, achieved by repeat printing, turning the screen slightly each time I print so the marks are misaligned.

The marks are taken from the envelope drawings below created for Salford Museum Art collection Covid19 Commisions the drawing shows stats flying above an empty street.

#Uosartcollection #hotbedpress

Working in the studio

#UOSartcollection #hotbedpress

The commission for Salford Museum Art collection continues I’m experimenting with a number of techniques and particularly wondering about how to display works with multiple envelopes.

The pictures show the brambles I was drawing earlier, leaves added using screen-printing techniques, the shapes are painted, transferred to the screen and then applied to the drawings, this can be tricky business, everything could go terribly wrong destroying hours and hours of drawing or it might work out.