painting and screenprinting canvases
I was commissioned by multidisciplinary artists Ellen Wiles and Arun Sood to create a series of canvases for their exhibition, Shifting Waterscapes at THG. Their beautiful show explores various watery ecologies in the UK, looking at water resilience and nature restoration, as well the entangled inhabitants and histories of these waterscapes.
I tried to capture in the canvases some of the qualities of the springline mires in the Blackdown Hills and at Otterhead Lakes. These are really interesting habitats that include wet woodland, deciduous woodland, grassland, freshwater streams and bogs.
The process
I walked around the sites a few times: sketched tiny wet ground plants (pondweek, pimpernel, asphodel, butterwort and sundew mosses), made rubbings of tree bark and collected grasses to print at home.
Then Arun, Ellen and I experimented with pigments, inks and exposure times for the drawings and plants to create screens, at Double Elephant Print Workshop. helped by the amazing Esme Cooper! I then dyed the fabric at home - layer after watery layer, dripping dry on my washing line and everything around it. We were all quite Otterhead coloured by September in our house.
Once we’d decided on colourways, I started the task of covering about 42 metres of canvas!
As always when screenprinting I love working with Esme at Double Elephant. Not only is it always more fun to work with a fellow printmaker, but Esme is super experienced at screenprinting on fabric. It would also have been impossible to print freehand like this (holding the screen while pulling the squeegee, and at speed).
(BTW we have a great online course - Print Your Own Wallpaper - this was a bit like that except much more relaxed “shall we add a bit of moss here?”etc
I also worked on the canvases at home, painting the micro details like bark, lichen, mosses and also historic maps and river tributaries. For these details I painted and drew directly on the canvas with oak gall ink.
Esme and I spent several sessions, printing and overprinting each side of the canvas until they filled up with the textures, patterns and details of the waterscapes. Here they are in the studio and in my garden - in various stages of printing and drying. I love how some of them ended up looked like antique wallcoverings.
