Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair 2025

Sarah Gillespie

Sarah Gillespie writes of her experience that underpins her mesmerisingly new mezzotint edition. I saw the Moon, wandering asleep among the reeds, 2025. Only this difficult 17th Century printmaking technique, engraved into copper, hold such rich tonal beauty.

“Against the optical grey of a now backlit France Woods, Goat Willows fan out, each of their fine dark lines offering up a last few perfect ovals of bronze. Opposite me the bark of a young sycamore is smooth and umber, the opposing symmetry of her buds as yet un-wrecked by salt and time. The parent tree to my right, chaotic & dark reaches out to a graceful Ash – the same grey green as the far woods I note – but darker. In her branches a robin, effortlessly singing the spaces between things. Glancing down at the open page in my lap, I despair at my pencil lines, pathetically tethered attempts to outline and describe. What am I doing here?

I no longer draw to record or gather information, the great privilege of drawing, as John Berger has said, is that a drawing of a tree is not a tree, nor is it me, nor even an expression of me. It is a drawing of a tree being looked at. It contains the experience of looking.” SG

Katherine Jones RA

In Katherine Jones ‘Snape’ hand-coloured sections blur the focus and this print sits between painting and printmaking. It is a double take. Simultaneously a drawing made from observation and the memory of a place overlaid with an assumed or imagined child’s eye view of the shape of the pine tree.

Snape was made initially from drawings made at Snape marshes in the summer of 2022 while on a trip with the kids out to the Suffolk coast. Drawing alongside children is full of interruptions and many of the drawings made during the trip consist of only 3 or 4 marks to a page. It is a memory is of tall Scott’s Pines and Jones’ children, storming through the landscape towards Snape Maltings.

Natasha Michaels

In Natasha Michaels’ monotype ‘Daphne’ the gestural movement, the drag and smear of the ink prevent a simple transcription of the original image. Messy brushwork, drips and pressure cause the image to blur and bleed into itself.

In the original of this engraving of Apollo and Daphne, the dark core of the myth is rendered palatable, even desirable by the precision and skill of its creator. We witness this ancient and unpleasant plot unfold again, somehow sanitised by the passage of time and the controlled hand of the artist. There have been centuries of aestheticising women being assaulted by divine power.

The surface of the image conveys the speed of pursuit and escape, Apollo is smudged away as Daphne becomes a tree .She has asked to be saved from him and is silenced in the process.