“Print Unleashed,” is a visual art print exhibition where creativity roams free. The exhibition brings together the work of a group of twenty-one artists, including staff, students and alumni from the Glasgow School of Art and DJCAD in Dundee.
2nd July – 18th July 2024
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The exhibition unveils the power of print using lithography, screen printing, etching and digital prints, expressing a range of ideas and concepts unique to each artist during their creative journey.
Featuring work by June Barton, David Bridgeman, Frankie Brown, Lu Chen, Emily Chung, Kefei Dong, Fi Robertson, Mary Harker, Karla Healy, Kristopher Malone, Lindsey McAulay, Aoife McGarrigle, Maya McMahon, Liz McNeill, Ralph Overill, Douglas Rogerson, Sunny Townsend, Yatong Tan, and Li Yihao.
June Barton
June Barton is a recent DJCAD graduate with a BA (Hons) in Fine Art. She is based in Glasgow and is currently a student in the MLitt in Fine Art Programme at Glasgow School of Art, where she is further developing her printmaking skills and techniques, focusing on experimental methods.
‘During my fine art studies, I developed a passion for printmaking and decided to specialise in this medium. I was drawn to screen printing because it allows for an experimental and playful approach to creating images. My process typically involves editing photos in Photoshop, transforming photographs and sketches into separations for print, and using stencils to produce captivating artwork. I enjoy the physical aspect of creating art, the unpredictability of the results and the exploration of new combinations of shapes and colours. Additionally, I often incorporate video clips from filmmaking, featuring either myself or my colleagues, to represent the subject matter I am addressing. My work is characterised by narrative and emotional elements, often focusing on the human form and exploring themes of grief and mortality.’
David Bridgeman
David Bridgeman’s artworks tell stories, evoke memories and instil a sense of place. He uses a variety of media: painting, drawing, constructions, sculpture, printmaking and video. The stories are fictional and formed from an event, an object or experience. They are influenced by a number of elements from early childhood and teenage years to life-changing experiences such as non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which plagued the artist’s life for a number of years. The works often bridge the gap between the Caribbean and his country of birth, linked to a relationship with a life on a Caribbean island that was only ever intended to last two years.
Frankie Brown
Through photography surveying and documentation, Frankie Brown is interested in selecting images of urbanisation and city regeneration through surfaces that come digitalised and processed through a computer algorithm. Through collecting degenerative surfaces and processing them through screen and textile digital printing; they then become edited and selected before reimagining placed on high-quality surface. There here becomes a comment on low and high valued representation of pictorial value. Image is used as material and in becoming dematerialised allows for dilemmas around originality and authorship. How far can the image be pushed before its transitive quality questions representation and identity?
Lu Chen
Lu Chen, born in China, currently resides in Glasgow, focusing on sound storytelling art, performance art and conceptual art.
Emily Chung
Emily Chung is a multidisciplinary artist based in Glasgow. Her practice spans diverse media including paintings, printmaking, installation, and performance. In her work, she draws attention to reproductive work, mass production and consumerism. She investigates the relationship between her body, machine and animal through prints; she seeks to express these investigations by creating images of figurations and fostering a dialogue between her female body and the world.
Kefei Dong
As an artist and student with years of practice in traditional Chinese painting, particularly landscape painting on paper and silk, Kefei has embarked on various explorations throughout her undergraduate and graduate studies. Whether creating large-scale black-and-white abstract forms or delicate colour representations in long scrolls, her artistic endeavours have been diverse and inclusive. Her creative themes span from religion and current events to exotic cultures, reflecting a wide range of subjects in her artworks.
Since joining the Glasgow School of Art, she has developed a strong interest in the local culture and customs. This cultural atmosphere has fused with her artistic expression, inspiring Kefei to explore printmaking techniques. She has begun to study lithography, creating works that embody a distinctive Chinese painting professional touch.
Mary Harker
Mary is a Glasgow based Artist, whose work explores themes of ageing, identity, memory, and loss. Her work spans across drawing, painting, and various experimental mediums, exploring communication beyond traditional boundaries such as frames and surfaces. Art serves as her medium for processing daily experiences.
Karla Healy
Karla is undertaking a Masters in Fine Art Practice after graduating in Painting and Printmaking from Glasgow School of Art in 2023. Her work considers the impact of humans sleepwalking into their own demise through a process of wilful ignorance and the neoliberal push for individualism. Karla is an unashamed disabled artist who juggles her full-time studies alongside caring for two children and two dogs.
Kristopher Malone
Born in a housing scheme in Wishaw, North Lanarkshire, Scotland, Kristopher Malone is printmaker, painter and sculptor. He studied Art and Design at HND level at Glasgow Kelvin College before attaining a First Class Honours Degree in Fine Art at Duncan and Jordanstone College of Art and Design.
Influenced by his upbringing, stories and situations faced in his life, Malone aims to present works that play off core memories of people who were raised in a Scottish housing scheme. Whether that be nostalgic childhood games or the seemly nonchalant criminality that surrounds life in a scheme. Malone strongly believes that you are a product of your surroundings and that the insights and lessons learnt during your early life through to your adolescence follow you forever. Malone’s works intend to encapsulate this, typically utilising a multitude of combined printmaking techniques and oil painting with a clear and strong visual narrative. His current series of works entitled ‘The Wains Wheels’ aims to play on aspects of juvenescence scheme life and evoke nostalgia in people raised in similar circumstances and backgrounds.
Lindsey McAulay
Lindsey McAulay is a visual artist based in Paisley who specialises in printmaking and works as a Screen Printing Technician at the Glasgow School of Art. She is interested in the meditative headspace of making, particularly with process-based work such as papermaking and printmaking and the juxtaposition of the freedom and constraints these processes bring. Her work in Print Unleashed is a composite of screen prints on handmade paper from recycled prints. She is interested in ritual, order and repetition and the performative act of creating pulp then working intuitively creates prints with images inspired by the fibres and forms found in the paper she makes.
Aoife McGarrigle
Aoife McGarrigle is an Irish artist based in Glasgow. She studied Fine Art Printmaking at The
Glasgow School of Art, graduating in 2001 before completing a Masters of Letters in Fine Art Practice in 2013. As a visual artist, Aoife’s main discipline is printmaking, working predominantly in lithography and etching. Furthermore, she works extensively with digital print, incorporating digital photography with traditional printmaking techniques.
Aoife is the lithography technician at Glasgow School of Art where she teaches stone, zinc plate and photo-lithography.
Maya McMahon
(b. 2000, West Sussex, England) is a Glasgow-based visual artist, and a recent graduate of the BA Fine Art Painting and Printmaking course at the Glasgow School of Art. Maya’s work looks at the material exploration of her physical practice; how she maps, layers and expresses the boundaries of her subject matter. Predominantly, Maya’s practice mostly consists of screenprints, and intaglio works; with her etching plates usually used on both sides to provide a spotlight on the marks made as an indirect result of other actions in the workshop. Maya realises her material process through a wide variety of technical and unconventional methods, which allows her the scope to play with ideas across many different visual languages. Within an iterative process, the scaffolding and uncontrolled marks allow for an interest in boundaries to take root. Maya aims to highlight the physicalness of the work she creates by showcasing its material qualities. This allows her work to speak to the geometry of the organic while simultaneously walking a tightrope over total abstraction; the interdependent relationship she has with the more uncontrolled elements of her practice allows the linearity of her imagery to function as their own structures.
Maya likes to think of her practice in multiple strands. Throughout her creative process, her bodies of work evolve through an undulating journey of repetition and trial-and-error while studying colour and form in her imagery. This playful experimentation in her work is then able to be regulated with geometric containers or digital image manipulation tools such as bitmapping. By having crossovers both technically and visually, Maya encourages the works to speak with each other in constant dialogue through structure, shape and subject matter.
Liz McNeill
Liz McNeill employs varying degrees of figuration in her work as a way to explore the potential of painterly abstraction, and its ability to extend and deepen the narrative, and to expand expressionism in her practice. Her current ideas are motivated by material investigations and conceptually explore issues of ‘overload’ and moral injury, filtered through her unique lens as a cardiologist.
Scale and mark making, and their relationship to the body, are fundamental to her exploration of movement, line and spatial tension. Recent paintings have been made in series and embrace the raw physicality of gesture and create a sense of depth and balance through the use of negative space.
Drawn images in screen printing provide a direct method for her to develop modulated processes of layering and a means to create dramatic shifts in the scale of her work. She explores the ‘push and pull’ between precision and exploratory freedom through Stone lithography.
Recent lithographs are from a body of work titled Moral Injury. They are created through a multi-step process of repeated cycles of painting, re-sensitisation of the limestone plate, additions and acid deletions. In this work, Liz draws parallels between labour-intensive printmaking processes and the current high-intensity workloads which overwhelm an understaffed NHS and ultimately erode the ability of its staff to provide the standards of care defined by their professions.
@elizabethmcneill.visualartist
Ralph Overill
Dr Ralph Overill is an artist, researcher and educator based between Glasgow and Essex, UK.
His art seeks to construct and explore an alternative sci-fi reality that exists in parallel to contemporary society, critiquing the governing systems and powers that appear, in his eyes, unjust and incompetent. Drawing on the concept of hauntology, Ralph creates fragments of lost futures, gesturing times, places and events that might have been. Through adventuring down these untrodden paths, a psychogeography emerges; a web of childhood memories and cultural influences that weave into his home county of Essex – the land of monsters and margins.
With strong foundations in printmaking, Ralph’s practice has evolved to encompass photography, creative writing, performance, installation and site-specific interventions such as projection, spray painting and sticker bombing. In 2022 Ralph was awarded a Professional Doctorate in Fine Art from the University of East London. He works as a printmaking technician at the Glasgow School of Art, exhibiting regularly in Glasgow and Greater London. Ralph has been awarded the Clifford Chance Purchase Prize, the Curwen Studio Prize and the Prix de Print for his art.
www.ralphoverill.com | @between_the_images
Fiona Robertson
Fiona Robertson is an artist based in Glasgow. She studied at Chelsea School of Art, Glasgow School of Art, and Warsaw Academy of the Arts. Fiona has been a Lecturer in the Painting and Printmaking Department of the Glasgow School of Art since the late 1990’s. Her work spans a range of mediums including drawing, painting, sculpture, and experimental film. The films have been selected for international competitions at festivals such as Oberhausen and Go Short. She also exhibits locally, recently solo exhibitions include tit-bits that was held at South Block, Glasgow in November 2023 and SALTHOUSE held in the Reid Corridor Gallery at Glasgow School of Art in 2024. Fiona regularly collaborates with, and is commissioned by, performance and theatre makers. In 2017, her site-specific sculpture and film Bad Sheep was screened as part of a touring performance promenade.
Douglas Rogerson
Douglas Rogerson grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee USA and studied a combination of physics, philosophy, and art at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. He subsequently received a fellowship at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany under the disciplines of Visual Art and Humanities before joining the fabrication industry in Brooklyn, New York for several years. He is currently pursuing his MFA at Glasgow School of Art.
Sunny Townsend
Sunny is a Masters student at Glasgow School of Art, focusing on printmaking to illuminate the local sea life.
Scotland has its own mini reefs full of weird and wonderful creatures! And she wants everyone to get how incredibly cool, but also fragile and few, these special places are now. Sunny weaves in elements of maths, data, ecology and worry from her background – working as a divemaster on the Great Barrier Reef, studying for a PhD in mathematical ecology from Glasgow Uni, travelling Africa teaching statistics, coding for a tech startup, and leading Scotland’s peatland restoration data team.
Yatong Tan
Yihao Li
Yihao’s works articulate a symbiotic relationship between form, materiality, and cultural identity, serving as a testament to the ongoing exploration of artistic expression and the complexities of human existence.