There is alchemy at work in Katherine Jones’s studio. From observational watercolours and drawings, from her research and ideas, many rooted in literature, she layers, fragments, and imaginatively transforms these elements through the print processes. No respecter of the methods she understands so well, Jones is a deliberately low-tech printmaker. She uses etching, block print, collagraph and even hand cut stencils to slowly build her layered, and distinctive images. Her exceptional capability with process allows her to create rich complex surfaces, ranging from painterly areas of wash to clear and distinct line drawing. The prints are developed gradually in thematic series, and each has an evolving proofing process.

They vary in size from intimate to epic. Although carefully editioned, no two prints are exactly the same and many are hand coloured. She says:

“Paintings are a precursor to any prints, but the prints resolve the image; my prints, inked up, printed and often hand coloured, always very slightly different even within the editions, are the most concluded aspect of my work.”

She quotes from the autobiography of one of her favourite writers the New Zealander Janet Frame “From the first place of liquid darkness, within the second place of air and light, I set down the following record with its mixture of fact and truths and memories of truths and its direction always toward the Third Place where the starting point is myth”.

She adds: “The element my literary influences have in common is an uncompromising honesty that comes from lived experience; a tension between visceral brutality
and beauty; I am interested in images that represent a tipping point between
safety and danger, where the unexpected lurks.”

These tensions between security and vulnerability, familiarity and strangeness and our changing place in the natural environment are a central focus of Jones’s practice. As critic Rachel Essex writes: “The passing of time and how we experience it is a theme Jones unfailingly revisits, be it in relation to coastal erosion, shelters that seem impermanent when looked at closely or slowing down so one can look meaningfully at things. The work is both expansive and domestic but resists valuing one above the other”.

Jones recent election to the RA aged 44, makes her the youngest artist Royal Academician for many years, a recognition of the ambition and consistency of her practice, driven by her particularly rigorous combination of original thinking and innovative printmaking.Brought up in Herefordshire, Jones studied at Cambridge School of Art, and MA Fine Art Printmaking at Camberwell College of Art, (1998-2001). She currently lives and works in Brixton, South London. Printroom has shown the work of Katherine Jones since 2006 including a solo exhibition in 2011. She shows widely, is the recipient of numerous awards and is represented in private and public collections worldwide.

There is alchemy at work in Katherine Jones’s studio. From observational watercolours and drawings, from her research and ideas, many rooted in literature, she layers, fragments, and imaginatively transforms these elements through the print processes. No respecter of the methods she understands so well, Jones is a deliberately low-tech printmaker. She uses etching, block print, collagraph and even hand cut stencils to slowly build her layered, and distinctive images. Her exceptional capability with process allows her to create rich complex surfaces, ranging from painterly areas of wash to clear and distinct line drawing. The prints are developed gradually in thematic series, and each has an evolving proofing process.

They vary in size from intimate to epic. Although carefully editioned, no two prints are exactly the same and many are hand coloured. She says:

“Paintings are a precursor to any prints, but the prints resolve the image; my prints, inked up, printed and often hand coloured, always very slightly different even within the editions, are the most concluded aspect of my work.”

She quotes from the autobiography of one of her favourite writers the New Zealander Janet Frame “From the first place of liquid darkness, within the second place of air and light, I set down the following record with its mixture of fact and truths and memories of truths and its direction always toward the Third Place where the starting point is myth”.

She adds: “The element my literary influences have in common is an uncompromising honesty that comes from lived experience; a tension between visceral brutality
and beauty; I am interested in images that represent a tipping point between
safety and danger, where the unexpected lurks.”

These tensions between security and vulnerability, familiarity and strangeness and our changing place in the natural environment are a central focus of Jones’s practice. As critic Rachel Essex writes: “The passing of time and how we experience it is a theme Jones unfailingly revisits, be it in relation to coastal erosion, shelters that seem impermanent when looked at closely or slowing down so one can look meaningfully at things. The work is both expansive and domestic but resists valuing one above the other”.

Jones recent election to the RA aged 44, makes her the youngest artist Royal Academician for many years, a recognition of the ambition and consistency of her practice, driven by her particularly rigorous combination of original thinking and innovative printmaking.Brought up in Herefordshire, Jones studied at Cambridge School of Art, and MA Fine Art Printmaking at Camberwell College of Art, (1998-2001). She currently lives and works in Brixton, South London. Printroom has shown the work of Katherine Jones since 2006 including a solo exhibition in 2011. She shows widely, is the recipient of numerous awards and is represented in private and public collections worldwide.

Margaret Ashman read Physics at Oxford and worked for several years in the field of Acousto Optics. She retrained as an artist printmaker between 1998 and 2005 at the University of Hertfordshire and the University of Brighton. An experienced printmaker specialising in photo etching. Her work with dancers has led to ethereal images capturing fleeting moments and spontaneous bodily gesture. Her studies of deaf people signing have led to work in which she addresses issues of faith, spirituality and emotion.
Ashman has worked with the following deaf actors, choreographers and sign dancers:the Japanese choreographer and dancer Chisato Minamimura, David Bower from Wales and the Cuban dancer Isolte Avila.  David and Isolte are part of SignDance Collective International. Ashman worked with deaf actors Nadia Nadarajah and Zoe McWhinney on a project for an exhibition celebrating Shakespeare’s four hundred year anniversary in 2016.

Ashman’s practice straddles many discourses: The use of a language for the deaf, typically BSL, in much of her work locates her practice within disability arts. In 2015 Yinka Shonibare selected her work for Shape Open – an open exhibition for disability arts practitioners. In the same year, she was commissioned by the Arts Council to make work for an exhibition, Shifting Subjects, bringing together self portraits by five contemporary women artists including Sarah Lucas. Ashman’s work made explicit the significance of language and communication as a means to define the self.
The Tempo Series and the Fragile Earth Series were made around the time of the start of the pandemic – Tempo Rubato was made before it started, while the Fragile Earth Series was made during the Pandemic. ‘Tempo Rubato’ literally ‘robbed time’ is named after a musical time signature whose beat is slightly slower or faster than a strict metronomical one. Many of us feel as though the Pandemic has ‘robbed us of time’ – with loved ones, of time pursuing work or pleasure or simply of our normal life. Fragile Earth began with photographs of wild flowers taken on walks during lockdown. The flowers were inverted to create the image, as our world was  ’turned upside down’.

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Ian Chamberlain is a Bristol based artist whose work takes influence from manmade structures.Ian has a long standing fascination with technology and architectural forms. The work aims to reinterpret these manmade structures as monuments placed within the landscape. These structures in turn then become monuments of their time. The prints serve as a visual historical document and record.

The structures in studies are devoid of people and the architectural scale can no longer be based on the physical measurement of the human body. The specific  use of etching allows these layers to be seen bringing an emotive quality and response to the work. The etchings aims to become a visual experience of the subject of the subject being worked on and changed at each state. The states are different comments, a journey of recording the object.

Projects in the past have included Goonhilly Earth station, The Lovell Telescope, Cheshire  Maunsell sea forts in the Thames estuary and the Acoustic Sound Mirrors  on the south Kent coast.

Ian has exhibited nationally and internationally,he is also a Senior Lecturer at the University of the West of England, Bristol.

In the 1930s, when she was still in her early twenties, Suzanne Cooper was one of the rising stars of British art.  Mary Kisler, Senior Curator at the Auckland Art Gallery, NZ, where one of her paintings now hangs, compares her work to that of Eric Ravilious and Christopher Wood.

Her work has been overlooked for decades, but now at last with an exhibition scheduled to open at Printroom on Sunday 3rd June and running until the 8th July- this forgotten figure of British Modernism is set to receive the recognition due to her.

Suzanne Cooper grew up in Frinton, a seaside resort on the Essex coast.   In 1935, when she was nineteen years old, she became a student at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art in London, where she was taught by the master print-makers Iain Macnab and Cyril Power.  Over the next four years she exhibited her oil-paintings and wood-engravings at the Redfern Gallery, the Zwemmer Gallery, the Wertheim Gallery and the Stafford Gallery, and with the National Society of Painters, Sculptors and Print-Makers (founded by Henry Moore in 1930) and the Society of Women Artists.

Fourteen of her paintings remain in the possession of her family.  At least a dozen more were sold, most of their current whereabouts being unknown.  One was bought by the influential collector and patron Lucy Carrington Wertheim and is now in the Auckland Art Gallery, New Zealand, hanging – fittingly – alongside paintings by Alfred Wallis and Christopher Wood, who was an important influence on her.   Another was sold at Bonhams Auction House in 2004 and bought by the then Director of 20th Century Paintings at Christie’s.

Suzanne Cooper’s career was cut short by the outbreak of World War II.  The Grosvenor School closed in 1939.   She married Michael Franklin in 1940.   They had three children, and she produced no more large-scale paintings, though continuing to work in pastels and chalk.    She died in 1992.

The prints that are for sale through printroom studio are a second edition, authorised by the artists family and printed by Phil Abel of Hand and Eye press in an edition of 45. They are numbered but are not signed. Each print is authenticated by Dan Franklin, the artists son.

All the prints can be bought framed individually in black with a white archival window mount for an additional £45.00 +postage and packing. Please email info@printroom.studio for further details

“Danielle Creenaune’s work occupies a liminal zone between abstraction and representation, where the experience of a place, rather than a literal rendition of landscape feeds her creative practice. Wind-swept and gestural, the artist distills the essence of her subject through reductive marks made confidently on lithographic plates, which through the alchemy of printmaking are released onto paper.” Marguerite Brown MA ArtCur, General Manager Print Council of Australia Inc.

Having lived abroad for the last 18 years, Australian born artist, Danielle Creenaune, worked out of her print studio in Barcelona and since 2019 she returned to live in Australia in Wollongong NSW. Her central motivation “is the intrinsic dialogue between landscape and people, how landscape is perceived through our library of pre-lived experiences and the ways in which this is reflected through the visual language of gesture.”

Her work has received numerous awards internationally including the René Carcan International Printmaking Award 2016 1st Mention in Belgium and the Corsair Prize for Innovation at Inkmasters Cairns 2018. Her lithographs were selected to represent Australia in the International Print Triennial Krakow 2015 and her book ‘When the Sea Wakes Inside You’ was exhibited in the 250th Royal Academy Summer Exhibition London 2018. Creenaune’s work is held in public collections including the National Gallery of Australia.

She completed a Bachelor and a Master of Art at the University of New South Wales, Sydney in 1997.

John Duffin was born in Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria and worked as a Ship’s Draughtsman at Vickers Shipbuilding & Engineering before studying at Goldsmiths College and taking an MA in Printmaking at Central St Martins School of Art. A member of Royal Society of Painter Printmakers he has shown extensively both in London and closer to home. Having spent almost equal lengths of time in a small northern town and in London, John Duffin’s work speaks of his experiences of both places, and of the struggle of man against an often domineering urban environment.

He is influenced by cinema and comic books, and his works posess a noirish quality reflected in the harsh shadow, lamplight and imposing architecture which seem to overwhelm the recurring figures.

Sarah Duncan is an artist printmaker who lives and works in Bristol. She studied Textile Design and then spent 10 years working within the Art Department in feature films. More recently she passed her Masters degree in Print with Distinction at UWE in Bristol.

Sarah’s work is based on the natural world, and has recently focused on both the cosmos and the sea; she is inspired by our relationships with the remote and inaccessible. Sarah is fascinated by phenomena which appear on the surface to be constant and uniform but on further inspection reveal themselves to be unique, constantly in flux and ever changing. She is influenced by forms and light invisible to the naked eye. Sarah’s practice aims to embed the humanly experienced physical world into the unimaginable enormity of the cosmos. It shares the central aims of science in trying to make sense of the natural world, but focuses on an emotional and embodied response rather than just an intellectual one.

Sarah seeks beauty in the realms of science, astronomy, and microscopy. Optical technology and scientific research allow us to glimpse the unseeable.  Her work reflects on these technological revelations, and tries to grasp what would be unknowable without them. Sarah’s printmaking revels in time and speed, abstracted by telescopes peering into the deep past or microscopes delving into hidden worlds.  Her most recent residency was at Kitt Peak National Observatory, Arizona. Throughout history the night sky has been a screen for our projected dreams.  Her work seeks to reflect this screen, and to find others to illuminate.

All of Sarah’s prints are hand printed using traditional printing methods including etching and lithography.