Home and Away Print Exhibition

Cumbria Printmakers are a group of artists based in the Lake District who, despite working from separate studios in a challenging geographical area, come together to contribute to the group.

We champion printmaking through our exhibitions, events and outreach activities. The group aims to support artists, promote printmaking and collaborate with our partners and the local community to develop courses and workshops which make printmaking accessible for everyone.

Home and Away describes our print group, if we’re not at home, we’re away… and our work and approach to printmaking reflects our beautiful and dangerous surroundings, whether it’s our actual home, back garden of the Lake District, amongst the glaciers and ice of the Arctic and the Alps, or wherever we find ourselves in our wanderings, catching fragments of the time and tide that waits for no man.
There are 24 artists exhibiting, covering a range of print disciplines; screenprint, etching, monotype, blind embossing, drypoint, lino cut, collagraph.

Some of the artists featured are…

Marion Kuit’s earlier work has used imagery from a variety of sources – scientific diagrams, distorted organic shapes, banal everyday items such as rubber gloves- all given a humorous twist with the intention of evoking a sense of puzzlement or unease. Hopefully, her fondness for Science Fiction is evident. Recent work has used imagery of torn net curtains to suggest abandonment and decay. Source material is anything that smacks of disintegration, currently torn packaging, melted plastic and abandoned industrial waste.

Sue’s @sueleechprintmaker love of printmaking began in the 1980’s whilst studying for her degree in Graphic Arts at Camberwell College of Arts. Throughout her career as a secondary school Art teacher, she has shared her passion for printmaking with her students as well as continuing to develop her own printmaking practice. Now recently retired from teaching Sue dedicates her time to exploring printmaking techniques and developing her work. Living in Grange over Sands she is inspired by the gardens and buildings of South Lakeland and often uses her own garden as a source of imagery for her work. Sue works in linocut, collagraph and monotype as she seeks to explore the relationship between colour, texture and pattern and is always on the lookout for unusual and interesting textures to incorporate into her prints.

Caroline Stow (image featured) has been involved in ‘making’ for as long as she can remember, and this is an essential element of her experience of being a person. She feels most alive when involved in making art. Caroline uses drawing as a thinking as well as a recording tool and is often looking for an emotional response, through fleeting and gestural marks. I have started printmaking in recent years and am fascinated by the tension I find between flowing, accidental and incidental marks which come to together to form a coherent image (only sometimes figurative) and the discipline needed to make crisp and clean prints. For me this is the ideal medium to meld together making and thinking. Taking elements from a range of images, drawing and prints and bringing them together in different relationships allows a set of internal dialogues to become visible. I will often spend several days making and remaking, forming and dissolving juxtapositions, using sections made using several different techniques. Finding the moment when different elements suddenly become ‘just right’ is a profound pleasure’.

Andrea Kershaw’s @kershaw_andrea BA (Hons) in Fine Art stimulated her interest in printmaking and this is continued through her MA Creative Practice studies. Drawing, painting and photography on location form the basis of her primary research and her practice has developed with interest of notions of the mountainous landscape and its interpretation. As with the strata of the landscape, her journey to her outcome of printmaking has allowed her to layer the landscape metaphorically and physically within her work, expressing her reaction and experience to a place. The evoked emotions of the landscape, are depicted in her investigation and translation of the vista using a multi-disciplinary approach incorporating photography, print-making and textiles.