Stephen Chambers RA – artist and printmaker
Chambers has won many scholarships and awards, including The Rome Scholarship, The Mark Rothko Memorial Award and The Kettles Yard Fellowship at The University of Cambridge. He has held numerous exhibitions internationally, most recently at the Royal Academy in London. His work is held in private and public collections around the world. 2008 saw the publication by Unicorn Press of an extensive monograph of his work by Andrew Lambirth.
Perhaps my first experience of printmaking (and I am sure this is not unique) came with the cutting of potatoes in nursery school. The ease of the repeated image, the detachment from the hand drawn smudge, even at that young age, added a beguiling sophistication.
As an artist who came to printmaking late, and without any training during art school, I retain sympathy for the crudity of the cut spud. Left to my own devices this is the process to which I’d need to resort. A number of years ago I produced an artist’s book, a cookbook, made out of potato prints. An edition of nine, the point at which the potato collapses, I liked the notion that I could print a book of recipes, and then cook and eat the blocks.
The extraordinary privilege of viewing the c.8000 prints entered for The Northern Print Biennale was the witnessing of the multitude of methods embraced to pin down the image. The incorporation of techniques both fantastically complex and innocently elementary are doing the same thing; employing a process to articulate an idea. What we were seeing was a vast sea of imagination, and this imagination being led by curiosity. The pursuit of the “what if?” and the “I wonder?”
As one of the selectors I arrived in Newcastle with no agenda other than helping to gather artists of individuality and autonomy. The result, I hope, leaves an exhibition of breadth and surprises.
There is work here that is by artists who work exclusively with their particular practice and there is work by artists who come to print as their second language. There is also work which stretches perimeters of what “print” is; food for thought.
Artists were encouraged to consider the wide possibility of ‘encounters with print’. We saw and included prints made 3D; Sarah Woodfine, prints viewable via mirrors only; Tim Long and prints consumed by a snail’s appetite for letter press ink; Finley Taylor. We also saw lithographs, etchings, lino-cuts, screen-prints and other orthodox languages beside; artists at the top of their game. It was noted though, and with a twinge of wistfulness on my part; that out of the thousands of prints submitted there was not a single King Edward in sight.
Kip Gresham – printmaker, publisher and artist
Gresham has been running collaborative printmaking studios since 1975. Although much of his work has been associated with screenprinting, over the last ten years he has worked with a variety of media. He is Master Printer at The Print Studio in Cambridge, England. The studio currently works with artists from the UK, Europe, America and Asia.
We selected the pieces on their merits. The images were mostly digitally projected so what we saw depended on the quality of the files we were sent; some were better photographed than others. Given that a sense of touch in the printing and the material presence of a print are important factors, we were working with only part of the story.
The submission of around 8,000 pieces was very varied both in terms of subject and technique. If what we saw is an indication of the range of media currently being used by artists, then printmaking is in good shape.
It was a real privilege to view so much work at one sitting. It was daunting to imagine the energy, creativity and resources required to produce all those prints. Power to the press!
Gill Saunders – Senior Curator (Prints), Word and Image Department, V&A
Saunders has curated a number of V&A exhibitions, most recently ‘Mapping the Imagination’. Her most recent books are ‘Prints Now: Directions and Definitions’ (2006), and ‘Siân Bowen: Gaze’ (2007). She is currently working with the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, on a major exhibition of contemporary artists’ wallpapers for 2010.
When I was invited to be a selector for the inaugural Northern Print Biennale I was pleased, and excited. As a dedicated print curator, I make determined efforts to get to degree shows, studios, galleries, exhibitions, art fairs and conferences, but I can only ever see a fraction of the work being produced in the medium every year. So the opportunity to spend two intense days in congenial company (and in my favourite UK city) looking at submissions from more than 800 artists worldwide was one not to be missed.
As a curator, regularly meeting different audiences, I am well aware of the confusions and misapprehensions which can impact on public perceptions of prints and print-making; for many people, the distinctions between different media, and between concepts of ‘original’ and ‘reproduction’ (distinctions further clouded by the rise of digital print media, and often exploited in marketing strategies) are the equivalent of arcane theological debates, and as a result, print is too often underestimated as a medium for original expression. In this context, I think the primary aims
of the Biennale are not only to raise the profile of printmaking, and to demonstrate its potential and its diversity, but in so doing, to foster wider understanding and enjoyment. The event is also of course an important means of supporting and encouraging practitioners, across the whole spectrum of print-making.
On the other hand, the Biennale is emphatically not designed to establish immutable criteria for excellence, nor is it a forum for pinning down the endlessly-elusive definition of what ‘print’ is.
Indeed, for me, much of the appeal of printmaking is that it is continually shape-shifting, challenging the familiar definitions, and re-drawing the boundaries. So I approached the selection process with a simple maxim: I was looking for prints with a purpose and a presence beyond a purely technical mastery, prints which celebrated the capacities of their chosen medium, and in which the artists had successfully realised their original ideas. Our final selection, painstakingly refined from the impressive diversity.