The Contemporary Craft Festival 2016 - Favourites Part 1

A couple of weekends ago I visited the Contemporary Craft Festival, in Bovey Tracey which I visited last year, and posted about here. Here are a collection of my favourite artists and designers and their work. You can find out more about the festival and all the artists here.

Ceramics

Kate Evans Ceramics 
Kate creates beautiful porcelain vases inspired by nature and plants, having a background in gardening.  I enjoyed the simplicity of her designs.

 

Elaine Bolt Ceramics
Elaine creates hand-thrown ceramic objects and vessels in porcelain, terracotta and mixed media. Her use of everyday and found objects in her work gives it a unique quality, as though it is telling a story.

Katherine Lees Ceramics

Katherine makes porcelain vessels and jewellery, and then she screen prints directly onto the clay surface. Katherine says: "The decoration adorning the surface of the vessels is inspired by the cabinets of curiosities popular in the Victorian Era. I am fascinated by the forms they contained and the way they were labelled and categorised." Her work really reminds me of old ceramic medicine bottle that you sometimes find at flea markets, but much more refined and beautiful. 

Printmaking

Robin Mackenzie

Robin is an illustrator and printmaker whose work I greatly admire! I love woodcut printing and how the medium gives a pleasant old-fashioned feel, mostly because the techniques and materials are the same ones that have been used for centuries. Robin's colourful reduction linoprints depict everything from scenic countryside to industrial cityscapes.

 

Jess Davies

Jess is a talented printmaker and member of the Devon Guild of Craftsmen who uses a variety of printmaking techniques such as Lino printing and Etching. You can see the landscape of the Devon countryside has much influence on Jess' work.

Lucy Gell

Another artist who uses a variety of printmaking techniques is Lucy Gell, who creates humourous and fun animal prints. Some of Lucy's techniques include Collograph printing, Acid plate etching and Monoprinting. I really like the humourous style of Jess's work, it really made it stand out for me.

Richard Shimell

Richard uses lino or soft flooring material to create his prints. I really admire the detail and texture within his work, I think it is quite difficult to get such detail with lino prints! I always end up chopping through bits that I wanted haha. Richard lives on the edge of Dartmoor and the influence of the surroundings is clearly evident within his work.

 

 

Some more lino prints

You may have seen my previous post where I shared my lino prints, well I decided to try them out again on some different paper stocks, and with two different green colours (although I'm not too sure that you can see the difference here on my scans). It was fun to use the big albion printing press instead of just rolling over the paper with a roller as I had previously done, and also this time I used oil-based inks which can give a deeper and richer colour.

Lino printing

Last weekend I had a go at Lino printing for the first time since I was at school, at a workshop in Frome Cheese & Grain. I had a few ideas in my head before I went but once I began to practice I realised I would have to scale down my ambitions to get finished in one day!

I decided to create a trio of Cacti and Succulents, that I could print all together or seperately. I wanted to print a terrarium shape on the top but I ran out of time, so maybe I'll do this in the future!

The material used is called soft-cut and is a bit easier to gouge out than traditional lino, however it is very easy to go wrong so if I was doing a proper print I would use proper lino I think.

Pick Me Up Graphic Arts Festival 2015 part 2

Welcome to the second part of my favourite things from Pick Me Up festival 2015.

I watched a lecture by Robert Sollis, co- fonder of Europa on how they developed this year's identity for the festival. The studio developed several different variations of their typeface to create a dynamic visual identity which I think looks appropriate to the event, which is about innovation, the handmade and unique.

Examples of the typefaces

The promotional posters for the event were hand screen-printed in three colours, and those that were too big were painstakingly hand painted (such as the large sign right outside the venue). I love the overprinting on the spotty words.

 

Screen printed poster

The wall inside the Pick Me Up platform room was covered in these posters, with keywords about the event.

Screen-printed keywords (borrowed from PMU Facebook page)

One of the most interesting things to me about the identity was the way that they used the colour separations from the screen-printed posters to inspire some cut out large installations for inside of the festival. I always think it's really cool how you can sometimes still make sense of an image/ text even when not all of the colour separations are present (when screen-printing). You can see on the image below what I'm on about (sorry it is a bit dark!)

Installation with parts of the typeface visible

Back to some of my favourite works.
I had a go at using a printing machine with Sope Studio. They had prepared a series of background patterns, which you could choose from and then choose a second tile to be printed on the top, creating some really cool bits of art (they're all featured on a special Instagram page). Here's mine:

Sope Studio tiles

The guys also had some great work for sale, some was again based on geology and rocks (a bit of a theme going on!) such as this one by Lydia Shirreff, and some more of their lino printed tile designs.

 

Finally I bought a print by LaTigre, a graphic design studio based in Milan, directed by the designers Luisa Milani and Walter Molteni. I really liked the geometry and simplicity of this screen print, but it also has texture when you look closely.

There were lots of other amazing artists but I can't write about them all, so I advise that you visit immediately! The exhibition is on until 4th May at Somerset House. 

I realised that I had totally forgotten to mention the marvellous stand that was Ohh Deer! They were extremely nice and let me make a lovely Deer themed greetings card by sticking lots of stuff and scribbles together and then they had a postbox to post it to a friend.

I bought some coasters from them to brighten up my desk.

Glam rock coaster Gemma Correll

Elephant by Sophie Corrigan