Swansea
Print Workshop @
Kings
Lane Warehouse
now viewing: Kings Lane Warehouse / Why Printmaking is important
Why is Kings Lane important to Swansea
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Why Printmaking is important
“A printmaking facility such as Swansea Print Workshop is of enormous importance to the many established artists now living in Wales, many of whom have extensive printmaking experience and skills but cannot afford their own presses and printmaking technology, and need to keep abreast of new developments in the printmaking field.
There have been rapid changes in materials with new safer techniques being introduced in recent years and printmaking professionally is a process of lifelong learning. Printmaking also offers established artists the opportunity to extend their artistic range and to show their work more widely. It is difficult for artists working in Wales to make an impact on the wider world beyond the Borders, and extremely expensive too to keep taking one's work to places where there is a wider public than can be found in the Principality. Prints are easy to send to far-flung exhibition venues and they also enable art-lovers with little money to spend to patronise the arts and their favourite artists without having to find the large sums demanded for paintings in watercolours and oils. Printmaking workshops produce art accessible to a much wider public and could be described as the poor art-lover's friend.”
Robert Macdonald
Chairman of the Welsh Group
Print workshops are now the biggest providers of printmaking provision and supporting of printmakers in the UK. Where this could be said of universities in the past, printmaking degrees have been marginalized and swallowed up into broader based fine art departments. Whilst there are a handful of specialist printmaking degrees left, (which are stronger and better positioned than ever), the onus for being the standard bearers for printmaking as a whole is generally with the independent print workshop. Moreover print workshops have much of the expertise in the field and are more likely to continue to push the boundaries and innovate, as they are working with artists in the longer term, sometimes for the whole artistic life of a printmaker. (Whilst this is a sweeping statement and it is true to say that smaller workshops are more concerned with survival and sustainability, the bigger print workshops have more of a buffer zone to experiment and to tread new ground.)
The largest role that print workshops have to play is in promoting and educating people in printmaking. Education programmes are becoming more sophisticated and innovative with some of the most recognised names teaching at open access workshops. Edinburgh Print Workshop has long been the ambassador in innovative approaches to etching, but so also have many of open access workshops. New workshops such as Green Door in Derby and North Notts Non-Toxic Studio in Nottinghamshire are taking up the baton. Spike Island Printmakers have long promoted the use of photo-polymer plates. Equally some of the traditional print methods such as resin aquatint, nitric etching, and stone lithography are being kept alive in other workshops.
Sean Rorke: Printmaker, Arts Consultant and Researcher
Synopsis Survey of private and public print workshop in UK.
Sean has been in the process of researching information for a definitive guide to Print Workshops for the last two years for A&C Black Printmaking Handbooks.