Lithographs – Kate Fortune Jones
Friday 31st October – Friday 21st November
Kate Fortune-Jones is a visual artist and fine art printmaker living in Stamford, South
Lincolnshire. She gained a BA Fine Art Degree at London’s prestigious Goldsmiths College, followed by a Post Graduate Diploma in Photographic Studies at the London College of Printing.
Kate has worked in the Film and Television industry for over twenty years, employed as an Art Director, Designer and Layout Artist in children’s animation, using her skills for drawing, composition and storytelling to inform her work.
In 2018 Kate joined the Leicester Print Workshop to pursue her printmaking ventures, in particular to further her skills in Lithography. Kate chose LPW specifically for its excellent facilities and its well regarded litho department.
Lithography, was developed in 1798 in Bavaria by Alois Senefelder. The term Lithography comes from the ancient Greek: lithos for ‘stone’ and grapho meaning ‘to write’. Large, heavy slabs of ancient Jurassic limestone mined from a particular quarry in Bavaria are used in this old printmaking process of lithography. The process works on the premise that oil and water repel each other. An image is created on the fine surface of the stone with greasy materials and then treated with with an ‘etch’ to to separate the drawn image area from the clear non image area. The process was developed to enable mass production of images, music scores or writing, and was soon expanded commercially to produce all manner of documentation, posters and advertising. Metal plate lithography was developed
in the mid 1800’s as a cheaper and more transportable means of commercial printing. Both Stone and metal plate lithography have been used widely and expressively in the fine art world, from artists such as Delacroix, Toulouse-Lautrec, David Hockney, Paula Rego and Elisabeth Frink.
For Kate, Lithography allows an exciting directness of expression whilst opening up
possibilities for more experimental and abstracted visual vocabulary. She enjoys the
challenge and discipline of the complex process, whilst exploring the unique chemical qualities inherent with working on the stone and plate.
Kate’s thematic concerns centre around her lifelong interest and study of natural history, specifically botanical and mycological subjects. Drawn from close observational field studies, she combines the factual with invention, to suggest a tension at play, where nature’s beauty, balance and harmony is not all it seems. The artist exploits the unique process behaviours of Lithography to suggest this under current of disquiet, in particular with her handling of tusche ink washes. Litho tusche ink is a specific mix of grease and pigment, which dries in reticulating waves and forms the delicate membraneous lines, which Kate manipulates to explore themes of growth, transformation and mutation.
Fascinated by the myriad forms and intricacies of organic architecture in both flora and fauna, the art works take on a bio-morphic quality, stark, interconnected and fluid, the forms allude to our shared fragility and resilience, in the face of external threats. Through her practice Kate aims to investigate the often fractious relationship between man and the natural world in the light of contemporary environmental and ecological concerns.
Previous Exhibitions:
Code on Code – Christina Wigmore
Friday August 29th – Friday September 19th
Christina is a mixed-media artist, printmaker and designer
and a member of Leicester Print Workshop
Her art and design process involves building layers of imagery
manipulated to create prints, collages and textile pieces.
With a DIY/Punk attitude to creating from what you have to hand,
re-using and repurposing materials for experimental printmaking
and mixed-media processes, inspiration comes from stories
behind treasured objects from the past and the unexpected and
absurd in life.
The Code on Code multilayered screenprints mix visual and
musical code reminding Christina of the Pianolo in her house
when she was a child
Random simple visual shapes were generated using P5*JS
computer code which were printed onto music notation code
punched into vintage pianolo musicsheets.
–
Between Movement and Stillness – Elisabeth Naylor
Friday June 27th – Friday July 18th
Friday June 27th – Friday July 18th
I work in rhythms — of body, of breath, of land.
My ink figures dance between presence and absence,
their gestures loud, their faces silent.
And when the world quiets, I walk the fields.
There, I collect the hushed offerings of hedgerows —
seedbeds, petals, fading stems.
Pressed to gel plates, they leave their ghost behind:
a whisper of bloom, a trace of time.
My practice is rooted in dualities — movement and stillness, boldness and fragility, human and wild.
Each mark, whether drawn or printed, is a gesture of remembering:
of what it is to be here, now, and alive.
Kate DaCasto
Friday May 30th – June 20th
GEORGE SFOUGARAS
Friday 25th April – Friday 23rd
MICHELLE KEEGAN – Quiet Lines
Friday 28th March – Friday 18th April
Michelle is Senior Lecturer in Printmaking at the University of Northampton.
She is fascinated by Printmaking; she lives for it and has never ceased to be excited
and amazed by its magic and potential. The nature of printmaking demands clarity of
thought, precision, and reflection throughout the making process.
Michelle describes her artistic practice as a way in which to conduct conversations
with landscape and reflect on notions of belonging, identity, rootedness, liminality,
and ‘home’. The work explores the dynamics and ambiguities of relationships,
therefore exposing private ways of seeing and that of wider public discourse. The
results are intricate and complex multi-layered prints that resist literal interpretation
and lack referential scale. Honouring instead a physically charged and deeply
personal mapping of the environment.
Periphery #14 – Michelle Keegan
ROBYN MACLENNAN
Friday 28th February – Friday 21st March
Imprinted: Type as Image – Lisa Pickford
Friday 31st January – Friday 21st February
Lisa Pickford. A series of letterpress mono-prints exploring composition and the inter-relationship between type and image.
@lisapickford_press
Convergence, Interference – Miriam Bean
Friday 29th Nov – Friday 24th Jan
Convergence, Interference is an exhibition of prints that examines the interplay between structure and fluidity, exploring the transformation of lines into waves through moiré patterns, animation, and distortion. Playing with various papers and processes, this recent body of work evolves from ideas around pure tones and silence, movement and stillness, and the visual interpretation of sound.
