Intaglio Printmaker Prize Winner: Haseebah Ali

 Tell us about your other works – are they similar or different? Do you tend to work within one technique?

Without realising, my work has always been inspired by people and their stories. My BA work was around the Syrian refugee crisis, I’ve always been driven into highlighting topics that matter the most to me, so I guess they’re still very similar in the passion for narrative. But now my knowledge for pattern work and printmaking has developed more which actually helps me feed out what part of the stories I want to highlight depending on the method used.

I’ve always worked with lino printing; I really enjoy the slow meditative approach with it and how there’s a tactile element to carving, plus it’s quite easy to find relief presses in print studios once you leave university so I relied on that a lot. In recent years I’ve been exploring lino print through pattern work especially South Asian and Arabesque motifs and I just became obsessed with how well they worked together. I did dip my toe into dry point etching in the past but for my master’s I wanted to learn a lot more about etching since my BA was in illustration and so I missed that drawing aspect to my work. This is the first time I’ve used two printmaking techniques together, hardground etching and aquatint with linocut. It pairs so well that I think I might just be working with that for a while.