Liz Somerville - Solo Print Exhibition
3rd March - 23rd June 2018
Liz creates linocut prints with imagery concentrating on landscapes and the incidental forms and structures found within them. Walking forms a major part of Liz’s work and life. She does most of it in winter, a perfect time to see a landscape; its bare bones, hard contours, un-obscured structures and un-adorned trees. Once back in the studio she draws what she’s seen, using sketches, photos and memory and then translates her drawings into lino.
After a foundation course at Canterbury College, a false start on a combined english and textile design degree course at Bretton Hall, Liz left Winchester School of Art in 1988 with a BA Hons in textile design. She spent 11 years in London having a variety of jobs including printed fabric design, management of the Contemporary Textile Gallery, and marketing and graphics for a structural engineering consultancy. This was alongside development her art practice in her shared studio on Hoxton Square.
Printmaking has always been a love of hers. Having experimented with lots of different techniques, relief printing, linocuts and woodcuts combined with painted blocks of colour, is, for her, the most satisfactory method. Landscape is a central theme and the winter the best time to see it; plough and livestock tracks, oddly shaped fields, quirky colour: flow, lyricism and mark-making.
For this exhibition, she will, at last, have a fully functioning relief press and much of the work will have been made using it. "These techniques are very much a means to an end; the overall effect is what I’m after, I’m no slave to convention."
