Prose to Print

Late Night Art
Written By Digital Officer
 

01 - Adam McIlwaine - The sweetest little song, screen-print, £65 (uf), 1/5

02 - Jackie Crooks – The Fox – night visit, Screen-print on paper and Perspex, £250 (uf), unique.

John Hewitt was my neighbour when I was an art student in Belfast. In the early 1980’s he wrote to me:

“Keep your eyes open even if you haven’t a chance to draw anything. The world is full of interest and possible subjects whose use may come anytime long after. Store your visual memory with shapes and colours. Best Wishes from your elderly friend, John Hewitt”

From these words the colours of the fox emerge.

 

03 - Declan Byrne - Hemmed in by the briny sea, Silkscreen, £165 (uf), £250 (f), 1/5

Work created in response to ‘simmer down’, a song by NI musicians Mount Palomar and Joshua Burnside

04 - David Younglove - Dawnbreaker, Silkscreen, £75 (uf) 1/25

‘Awake! For morning in the bowl of night, has flung the stone that puts the stars to flight,’ reads the first line of Omar Khayym’s (b 1048, Persia) Rubaiyat. The tradition of Persian miniature has produced paintings in accompaniment to this and other verses from the masters of Persian poetry for centuries and is the foundation for my approach to imagery. In Dawnbreaker, I am balancing the conventions of this tradition with contemporary, graphic stylization while retaining the visual lyricism that imparts its distinctive characteristics.

 

05 - Jonathan Brennan - Ciaran Carson’s Dream, Linocut, image transfer and graphite on Fabriano Rosaspina paper, £125 (uf), A/P (edition available on request)

‘Ciaran Carson’s Dream’; is part of a new collection of work by Jonathan Brennan entitled Star Factory (created in 2022-23 and on show in Crescent Arts Centre in September 2023). All artworks in the collection take their inspiration from Ciaran Carson’s masterpiece The Star Factory. Some are directly illustrative of passages in the work, others riff on the multitude of themes this uncategorisable text delves into, others still are more collaborative in nature, bringing in elements and concerns from the artist’s own practice.

06 - Anushiya Sundaralingam, Lines, Dry-point, sculpture, POA Parallel Lines (Lyrics)

The lines I have written that you read between
The lines on the pages
The lines on the screen
Of lines spoken - I say what I mean.
It’s parallel lines that will never meet.

– Debbie Harry

 

07 - Sam Thompson - Winter trees, Monoprint and stencil, £90 (f)

In her poem ‘Winter Trees’, Sylvia Plath used the idea of trees in wintertime as a metaphor for her life, her mental health and her perception of how women are viewed in society.  My print, therefore, depicts Plath’s words as trees in winter, with blue hues and grey fog.... leaves have gone and branches are bare.

08 - Coby Moore - The stolen child, etching, £60 (uf), £100 (f), 1/15

Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

– ‘The Stolen Child’, W.B. Yeats

For me the poem is just as relevant today as it was then. The four-line repeated chorus at the end of each verse has a hypnotic rhythm and stands out to me. Yeats had a fascination with Irish folklore and myths. The Stolen Child is one of Yeats’s popular early poems. The voices of the faeries tempt the innocent boy and the reader away with visions of an enchanted world.

Eventually the faeries take the boy to their world without the shelter and love of his home. The poem was written in 1886 and published in Publication of Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry in 1888.

 

09 - Niamh Ferguson - Duo, etching, £80 (uf), £110 (f), 1/50

10 – James Allen, Wren, etching, £375 (uf), 22/45

I have known the poet Michael Longley for many years and admired his poetry, much of which celebrates the natural environment. This etching, “Wren”, was one of four editioned original prints made based on Michael’s poems about birds - the others being “Kingfisher”, “Robin” and “Dipper”. The image was drawn directly onto the copper plate in the grounds of Riddel Hall when BPW was based there.

 

11 - Sarah Lee - The path less travelled, etching, £150 (f), A/P

In response to the American poet, Robert Frost ‘The road not taken’

12 – Maura Lynch, Palace graves, cyanotype, £225, V/E and Photographic plate £95

‘I dream of a house....
A poor secret house, as in an old print.
That only lives in me,
Where sometimes I return to sit down
And forget the grey day and the rain.’

– ‘The Dream of a Home’ by André Lafon.

The words ‘as in an old print’ link with the glass photographic negative plate of a secluded house reflected in a pool, a mirror image, suggesting that within that world there is another, one level down, of a story within a story.

The glass plate negative has been enlarged and altered, printed as a positive cyanotype.

The secret house is now viewed through a boundary, a canopy of flowers and foliage to suggest passing time and the person gazing, here and now.

Vivid Prussian blue is ambiguous, dreamlike. It does not advance but draws us after it, from print to prose to print, an echo of an elsewhere.

 

13 - Helen Lavery - Only fools and tortoises, etching, £225 (uf), 1/10

14 - Josephine McCormick - Society of the spectacle - Screen-print and photo intaglio, NFS, 1/1

This work was inspired by Guy Debord’s book, ‘Society of the Spectacle’. Published in 1967 in Paris. Guy Deboard was the editor of the journal ‘Internationale Situationniste’.

He explored unity and division within appearance, spectacular time and the commodity as spectacle. I read the book in 1982 and it has been a core influence within my work ever since. The book still resonates today. ‘Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation’, ‘In a world which is really topsy-turvy, the true is a moment of the false’.

 

15 - Fiona Ní Mhaoilir - Emboss and paint print, A/P, 1/1

16 - Linda Barbour - Fréamhacha, screen-print, £280 (uf), £350 (f), 1/10

 

17 - Lisa Murray - Love, Photo Intaglio and chine colle, £75 (uf), A/P

18 – Denise Griffith - You have to kiss a lot of frogs, etching with hand colouring £100 (uf), 1/1

Prose to Print made me think of a fairy tale and what a better fairy tale than the Frog Prince.

 

19 - Linda McBurney - Three colours (Blue, white, red), photo intaglio, triptych, £75 (uf), 1/6

I have chosen to create an image that celebrates script writers, world cinema, and subtitled drama. I have selected the trilogy “Three Colours Blue, White & Red” (Red being my favourite), written and directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski.

The colours used in this triptych reference the French flag, the photo intaglio image in the centre hints at the storm in the final scene of Three Colours Red.

All the leading characters from all three films are survivors of a ferry disaster at sea and are seen stepping off a rescue boat at the end of the film. All survive, all have their own stories to tell, unaware of the existence of each other. Similarly, the leading characters appear in each of the three films, suggesting that we are all on the periphery of each other’s lives. How paths cross, coincidence, love and unusual friendships are common themes that run like threads through all three films.

I have used inks in ultramarine, titanium white and naphthol red on somerset paper. Kitakata paper was used for the chine collé photo intaglio image. I chose an edition size of 6, as this number is referenced several times throughout Three Colours Red.

20 - Elaine Megahey - Drift, Monotype, £230 (f), 1/1

Drift, walking meditations, inspired by the poetics of place and a Michael Longley poem about this particular landscape of Sheskinmore, Donegal.

 

21 - Dora McCavera - Stone Man, aquatint etching, £160 (uf), £270 (f), 1/8

“And there I found an old man, and though I prayed all day
And that old man beside me, nothing would he say.”

– ‘The Pilgrim,’ W.B.Yeats

22 - Marcus Patton - The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, silkscreen, £250 (uf), £400 (f), 1/4

Everyone knows the phrase “A rose is a rose is a rose”, though probably many fewer have read the surrealist poem Sacred Emily by Gertrude Stein in which it occurs. It refers to all the meanings of rose (the name, arising, pink, and the flower), and this print pulls together many different kinds of rose around portraits of Gertrude Stein and her partner Alice B Toklas, with references to another of Stein’s books and also to a ridiculous rose story by Frank Muir.

 

23 - Jessica Weber - The city speaks, Berlin, screen print, collage, £750 (f), 1/1

“The City Speaks” is a tribute to Berlin, where Jessica and her husband lived for over a decade. Inspired by graffiti around the city, Jessica digitally collaged images, screen-printed her artwork using various halftone colours, and applied a split fountain technique for lettering. To bring the piece to life, she incorporated collage elements and collaborated with a framer to integrate the mount seamlessly.

24 - Ivan Frew - There are things known and things unknown, monoprint, collagraph, hand colouring, £195 (uf), £240 (f), unique

 

25 - Jenny Bailie - Nothing gold can stay, £100 (uf), 1/1

The work was inspired by pressed leaves collected in Tollymore Forest by my late father-in-law, Harold, who died prematurely in his late 40’s. Recently, my brother-in-law passed Harold’s collection of leaves to me and asked me to ‘do something’ with them. I wanted to create a work that commemorated Harold’s love of nature and also his untimely death. The words of Robert Frost’s poem, Nothing Gold can Stay, seemed a perfect way to do this. I’ve used offset printing to create ghost-like images of the leaves, alongside more solid chine-collé images and directly printed elements.

26 - Margaret Moore - For Sylvia, dry-point, £120 (uf), £140 (f), 1/12

 

27 - Dónall Billings - Éaguimhne (Oblivion), Photo intaglio, multi-plate, £170, A/P

28 - Eamonn McCrory - The Poison Tree, linocut and Letterpress on handmade paper, £100 (f), open edition

The Poison Tree by William Blake is a poem about how unspoken anger can fester and grow. I always liked the two lines that I’ve added beneath the image. The paper for this piece was hand made as part of the Linen Biennale. The flax for the paper was grown on the Mallon Farm in Cookstown. Helen Keys gave an interesting talk on how they grow and process flax. I was fascinated by the process of making paper from flax that Regine Neuman demonstrated at Flax Studios. I have now ordered some rough flax tow from Mallon farm to have a go at making some more of this wonderful paper.

 

29 - Pat Griffin - “of exiled souls the dream” a line from Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem ‘The Flowers’, screen-print, POA, 1/1

30 - Ivan Armstrong - Notes towards manifesto, mixed medium print, £280 (f)

 

31 - Margaret Ellis – No ruined stones, aquatint etching, £110, 1/1

Quote from, ‘On a raised beach’, by Hugh MacDiarmid

 
 

Prose to Print at Belfast Print Workshop has been made possible thanks to National Lottery players and money raised for good causes.

 
 
Digital Officer https://bpw.org.uk
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