Sarah Harris

Sarah is a firm favourite with visitors to the gallery and has had work on display in our print browsers for many years.  Her last exhibition was for our 35th anniversary; Master Printmakers, back in 2017.  Sarah’s work consists of limited edition screen prints that begin as pen drawings.  A limited colour palette is used throughout to enhance the line work, adding depth and interest through placement and tone.  Having graduated in 2005 with a BA (Hons) in Fashion Design, Sarah had previously spent her career working within retail head offices in a variety of roles including design, marketing and buying.  She rediscovered a love of drawing in 2011 through an evening course at Leeds College of Art, which also reintroduced her to printmaking.  Sarah first began to work as an artist in 2012, and the following year she was awarded The Curzon Exhibition Award which gave her the opportunity to have her first solo show, Discovering Yorkshire, in 2014.  In 2014 and 2015 Sarah’s prints were shortlisted for the Flourish Award, for excellence in printmaking, winning the People's Choice award in 2014.  In 2015 Sarah’s Brimham Rocks print was shortlisted for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.  “I have always enjoyed the exploration of landscapes and I combine this curiosity for my surroundings with my practice, endeavouring to produce an image that brings you into the reality of that scene, whilst evoking a feeling of nostalgia and sense of discovery.”  To start each piece Sarah goes out with her camera and investigates the subject, once back at the studio the image is interpreted into a pen and ink drawing, the same size as the finished print in order to retain the quality of line, the drawing is then used as a template to create the finished piece and block stencils are produced for each individual colour.  Each print is then hand screen printed using the finest mesh possible, with each colour individually registered to the next.

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Rebecca Drury

This is the first time we've worked with Rebecca and we're excited to showcase the beautiful work here for this group print exhibition.  "I made my first linocut during A-Level Art, but really began printmaking around ten years ago when I completed short courses at the St Barnabas Press and Curwen Press in Cambridge.  When I moved back to Dorset in 2015, I joined Poole Printmakers, which is a membership-led cooperative with a wonderfully welcoming community of printmakers.  My printmaking focuses on the Dorset coast and countryside, where I spent much of my childhood and where I am now raising my own family.  I have a great love for nature and also work in biodiversity conservation, so you will also find many local species and habitats depicted in my prints.  My work aims to capture the movement and feeling of spending time in Dorset’s most beautiful and biodiverse places."  Each of Rebecca's prints is printed by hand from a hand-carved lino block using traditional printing techniques.  Most of my Dorset landscapes are reduction linocuts, which is a method of block printing in which each colour layer is taken from the same block.  More lino is removed from the block for each layer and each colour is printed on top of the last.  This means that an entire edition must be printed in one go, and that once you have carved into the block for the next layer, you can’t go back to print more.

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Cathy King

Cathy is another new printmaker to the gallery, one we have admired for some time, so it's a joy to finally have the opportunity to work with her in our Coast exhibition.  She  lives in Devon and after initially training as an Early Years Montessori teacher she gained a BA (Hons) in Humanities with the Open University.  Her return to the arts was realised after joining the Double Elephant Print Workshop.  It was here that she immediately engaged with the various processes that the discipline of printmaking had to offer.   Her primary practice focusses on relief print where she makes small editions of both multi-block and reduction linocut and woodcut.  The use of line and form are central to her work and colour is used carefully to balance composition and design producing semi abstract and figurative prints.  The inspiration for her work is widely taken from the natural environment, in particular the landscape and coastline of Devon where ideas are informed through visiting and re-evaluating the landscape to realise a design.  Reference to memory is also important, where perceived notions of place can be altered and reworked resulting in an abstraction of the land, capturing an essence of place.  Most recently she have been exploring this notion through the medium of Monoprints where combined mark making and cut stencils are over layered to reveal an abstracted landscape.

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Liz Somerville

Liz last exhibited with us back in 2018 when she had her first Solo Print Exhibition here; a show which visitors fell in love with.  She graduated from Winchester School of Art in 1988 with a degree in textile design.  For the next 10 years she had a number of design related jobs before moving to Dorset in 2004, where she has subsequently concentrated on her printmaking.  Since being a teenager Liz has experimented with print.  The technique she is working with now combines linocuts and gouache.  This allows her to re-work a single image many times, changing its appearance in each case.  Inspired by the work of Nash and Bawden and Ravilious, her imagery concentrates on landscape and the incidental forms and structures found within it.  Her work explores the texture, rhythm and muscularity of land: “There is a natural alignment of all the different elements in a landscape.  There is an immovability of the land itself; time renders Man’s impact superficial and impermanent”.