Intaglio Printmaker Prize Winners: The Mawddach Residency

Tell us a bit more about your work – what has inspired your practice?
Walking and collecting both objects and extensive imagery are a big contribution to research methods and inspiration within my practice. By gathering and recontextualising found objects and forms, I construct new relationships that inform my drawings. These compositions exist between documentation and imagination, through printmaking and drawing. I embrace repetition, layering, and material transformation to reflect decomposition. The gradual disintegration and reworking of images align with the themes I explore, allowing the work to physically embody cycles of decay and regeneration. I am inspired by the intersection between art and science, old anatomical drawings and the shared structures of human and animal bodies. I am influenced by recurring patterns in the natural world and the way these shapes reappear across systems of growth, transformation and decay, including the intrinsic presence of death within these cycles. Visually, I’m inspired by the merging of species with anatomical forms, often imagining apocalyptic or post-human states where humans, animals and plants become interconnected. These amalgamations allow me to question humanity’s impact on the environment and consider how life might evolve beyond us in an increasingly damaged and artificial world.

How did you approach your time on the Mawddach Residency, and what were you hoping to explore while you were there?
To be honest, before arriving at the Mawddach residency, I didn’t have much of a plan. I was treating it as an opportunity to get back in the flow of making and to collect inspiration for future work. Balancing a full-time job, along with the pressures of trying to continue making as a recently graduated emerging artist, the residency was the perfect break I needed to be fully immersed in nature and my practice. I wanted to see where the landscape took me, re-learning how to get lost, walking, cycling, and filling my sketchbooks. Coming out of uni and losing access to the printmaking facilities I crave has been difficult, so I used this time to figure out a shift in my practice, by attempting to work on a smaller scale as well as exploring more accessible printmaking techniques. I found that much of my focus turned toward ideas of birth and new life. Situated there for two weeks right at the beginning of Spring, I found myself surrounded by subtle yet constant signs of renewal. This shift in the seasons echoed my ongoing interest in transformation influencing both the forms I collected and the drawings that emerged from them.

What materials or techniques did you find yourself using most during the residency, and did the environment influence those choices? Did you experiment with any printmaking?
Initially, I produced lots and lots of drawings, which is always the way I work before turning to printmaking, to provide resources I can work from. I also used Art Graf water-soluble graphite and Sumi ink in my sketchbooks. I found it really worked with the landscape, particularly on grey, murky days. They were two great materials for working outside, as I could use the water from the estuary or sea to paint with. I did a lot of on-the-move monoprints, where each morning of the first few days on the residency, I would ink up my plate and take it on walks/cycles. It was great to work with printmaking directly from observation, resulting in some very immediate monoprints which influenced future engravings. In one of my favourite prints I made early on, called ‘Behold Dead Champion’, the engraving plate stemmed from an initial monoprint of two dead lambs in Froig. I revisited these plates at the end of the residency, combining engraving with monoprints made using sheep wool I had collected during my stay. I also experimented with Tetra Pak printmaking briefly, as well as spending a day dedicated to kitchen lithography.

What’s next for the ideas or work you began at Mawddach?
I still have many ideas for drawings/prints, which I didn’t get around to on the residency, as well as my drift wood and bone collections,  I hope to create more drawings from. A particularly interesting piece of wood I found, which resembles a womb, similar to that of Clemente Susini’s Anatomical Venus, where the layers are revealed. I have been drawing within this, various embryonic stages and aim to continue this series of drawings, which all stemmed from this one piece of wood collected in Fairbourne. Upon returning home after the residency, I had an abundance of reference images, which I’ve recently turned into a photobook, for inspiration on colour and texture. I rarely use colour within my work, so I hope to step out of my comfort zone and use this to help me develop a colour palette based on the landscape surrounding the Mawddach residency. I am also interested in creating my own ink for printmaking and drawing from the bones I acquired on the residency, to connect future work back to the landscape and experience that was so inspiring and important to my practice.