When did you first try printmaking?

April 2002, London — the first day of the Morley College summer term, one week after I’d moved to the city. I was twenty-eight, already an art academy graduate and a working graphic designer and art director, and I had never once seen an intaglio or litho press running. By the end of that first day my head was exploding with the possibilities in front of me. I thought I might be good at mastering this. Turned out it would control my life instead.

Within a year I’d tried almost every printmaking technique there was — some of it didn’t go well, but a few months in my first soft-ground etching got into the National Printmaking Exhibition and won a prize. I remember thinking: there must be a career in there somewhere.

I also fell in with a community of printmakers in South East London at the time, and I don’t think I’d have taken the whole thing seriously without them — a genuinely different, genuinely good crowd doing good work. There was something intoxicating, too, about the idea of making a living outside the constraints of the commercial industry I’d come from.

I learned a lot just by watching how working artists set up their spaces and handled their techniques — long days spent minding the counter at Greenwich Printmakers or at Printspace on Bear Gardens, in those first years in the profession.

Tell us a little about your studio and where you are based?

After more than a decade in London, we moved out in 2014 — I’d found a property off the A1 North with an empty, derelict barn at the bottom of the garden. It was a spontaneous decision, but the barn was too good an opportunity to pass up, and I needed more room to work. It took over a year before I actually unpacked the studio boxes and got the presses out of storage. We did most of the work on the barn ourselves, and hard work aside, I enjoyed building the space up from nothing.

The best advice I was given when I was setting up was from Mike Taylor of Paupers Press: “put everything on wheels.”

What that meant, I think, was paying attention to both structure and flexibility in a printmaking space. A studio is an exoskeleton — mine’s not perfect, but it works for me. I move between etching, silkscreen, lithography, and various mixed-media experiments, with a drawing and painting nook on the mezzanine above the printing floor. I count myself lucky to have this space. Leaving London cost me some of the community buzz, but it’s made me more self-reliant and independent.

Being outside London also made me more appreciative and curious about artists and communities working beyond the capital. More and more artists are getting squeezed out by high rents and insecurity, and I’ve watched the small printmaking world grow wider geographically as friends and colleagues scattered across the UK and beyond — but thank god it’s stayed close creatively.

Please tell us more about how the “Out Brief Candle” project came about?

Mostly by accident. There was a brief to submit a couple of pieces for a group show marking Shakespeare’s 400th anniversary in 2016, and I’d just finished unpacking my new studio — I think I was looking for something meaty to get my teeth into.

The other thing was a back injury that had me stuck in bed for a while, forced to rethink how and why I make work at all. That enforced pause turned into an opportunity to try something different, so I wiped the dust off my laptop and started mixing images digitally. I didn’t have much of a plan to begin with.

What I realised pretty quickly is that what interests me most is stories, and how they work on the mind and the senses — and Shakespeare’s a lot of fun if you’re into that. I’m drawn to work, making it and looking at it, that holds different and sometimes opposing viewpoints open rather than resolving them, and poetry — especially at the level of wordplay — is full of exactly that.

With Shakespeare I found an incredible sparring partner. The more I read and listened, the more I wanted to think about it, argue, contend.

I’m not a scholar, and I never studied Shakespeare at school. I don’t hold a single dogmatic view, and I’m not intimidated by one either. I’m not an expert on all and everything — but then, neither was Shakespeare. It’s enough for me that he, being a fellow human and a poet, “knew” something about me as a human, and I want to know more about myself too. That’s what makes this personal. Poetry, more than science, is where I go looking for answers. I have a lot of questions; it turned out Shakespeare had a lot of questions too. And the hook is that no matter how many answers humans amass, there are still more questions than answers.

Can you describe your process of working on these prints?

I read. I “collect” words that produce an echo in my mind, on the front few pages of my notebooks — for safekeeping, since it might be a while before I know what to do with some of them. I like working on as many as I can safely hold in my head at once; right now I’ve got three pages of “unused words.”

The ideas tend to cover a wide range of human variation, so early on I decided not to limit myself too much, technically or aesthetically. There are a couple of rules, though: I stay in the same square format, and the images remain monochrome. Super rigid, super flexible — the series was literally “put on wheels.”

This was my first attempt at working exclusively in the tonal halftone range. I use lithographic photo-plates to bring together drawing, photography, and digital manipulation, but I think about how the print will actually run on my press from the very start, and I’ve worked out a system that produces fairly consistent, and I hope vibrant, results. I care a great deal about digital pixels, the same way I’d care about the density of aquatint grain.

I print everything by hand — that’s always been critical for me, to end up with a physical, human-made artefact. There has to be something to interact with on a corporeal level: something that catches the light a certain way, something to touch, something immediate, something unmissably unique.

It still amuses me that prints start out as a lifeless heap of black, oily dirt — the same way, they say, life first emerged from a primordial soup. Being part of that feels like a kind of alchemy.

There is a lot of implied movement in these still prints – sort of like a snapshot from an experimental movie. I also really enjoyed your installation at the Woolwich Print Fair too. Is this immersive atmosphere to your work intentional? How do you play with formats and techniques in your practice?

The things and objects that interest me most are all moving things, and I think movement is integral to how we understand both ourselves and our environment.

We think through movement more often than we acknowledge. It’s tied to some of our most basic human concepts — near and far, hard and soft, weak and strong, open and closed. Most of our material concepts are rooted in movement we’ve observed or made ourselves. Exploring the world through the body is just what we do.

I work in 2D, but I don’t see that as a limitation — if anything it’s a liberation from certain physical constraints, gravity being the obvious one. A static image gets to suspend motion in time or space, and that’s a hugely seductive storytelling device.

I’d like to think I’ve succeeded when some movement gets triggered in a viewer’s mind too. Art is about new ideas, and the freshest, most relevant ones happen at the point of contact between your mind and mine — that’s the real site of generation, more than anything that happened alone in my head beforehand. At the Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair installation, I wanted to play the fair’s sensory overload against a fairly claustrophobic space of my own, with its own overload of a different kind — visitors found their way through with a torch. It was about personal alienation and loneliness set against a wider cacophony, though introverts, I’d guess, probably found it peaceful. There was a bit of theatre to it, and it was genuinely good fun to put together — a rare thing for an art fair to support.

I think of my audience as one human mind at a time — the mind that moves, and the mind that plays. I like that you used the word “play.” A happy interaction is often a kind of play. We play when we learn, we play when we create, and yes, I play with formats and techniques in the studio too.

An artist book is one way that play gets “played out” — an object that manipulates both time and the senses at once. An animation extends a movement in a particular direction, bending how forces move against each other. I’ve always been drawn to that. A small etching, pulling the eye in as close as it’ll go, plays with scale and the feeling of intimacy instead. And drawing — the most direct way a hand can put something into the world — is right at the top of the list for me.