Warehouse & Mill

About

The Rotherhithe Suite: a suite of 6 screenprints 2015

From the late 1970s through to the early 1980s, Maureen, my sister-in-law, lived on Barge ‘Olga’, which was moored in the Thames next to “Waterside”, a craft collective at 99 Rotherhithe Street. Visits to Olga provided the subject matter for the erstwhile series but lack of technical savvy and other all-consuming projects scuppered its development in the 1980s. Time rolls by, negatives are re-discovered and in 2015 I devoted most of that year to these prints.  They are the most technically complex work that I have produced so far, using layers of grey tones to establish the image with added washes of transparent colour.

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In 2016 the Rotherhithe Suite were accepted into the collection of the Museum of London.

Arborfield Mill: a suite of 13 screenprints 2016

Arborfield Mill or Helpston Paper Mill started up in the 1850s. It lay in a triangle closely bounded by the railway and the road to Stamford. Originally the owners used twitch or couch grass to make paper but this proved unsuitable. Papermaking continued on this site until the 1980s under a variety of owners. By the time I moved to the area the Mill had become derelict.The Arborfield suite continues my interest and use of Victorian industrial buildings and machinery in printmakinh]g. The four chosen images are printed in colours that echo the sepia toning and cyanotype print styles of late Victorian and Edwardian photography.