I’m very excited and honoured to be a part of this one!
Paul Croft TMP, Master lithographer has been on sabbatical and has spent a year funded by a grant from the Leverhulme Trust. It has enabled him to research and curate an exhibition of British Lithography which is due to open at the Aberystwyth School of Art Museum and Galleries on the 24 October 2022.
Titled Collaboration in Practice: British Lithography 1800 – 2022, the exhibition traces the history of British Lithography through the lens of collaboration, and provides examples of lithographic practice from C19th, C20th and C21st.
To coincide with this exhibition Croft has written a book which will be published by Gomer Press and will be available during the exhibition and online. He has previously written a few books on lithography and is a tutor at Aberystwyth School of Art. He is the reason that I did my MA there, a great combination of pedagog and master lithographer.
Paul Croft trained at the Tamarind Institute in New Mexico, THE place to train to become a master lithographer. It takes a further 2 years once you’ve completed your post-graduate degree. It’s serious stuff. He’s a dude. He also by-the-way, like me, went to Edinburgh College of Art.
AND what’s more, he’s including my work, The Woodland Bath (illustrated below), in the book and exhibition.
The exhibition opens on 24th October 2022 at Aberystwyth School of Art, Buarth Mawr, Aberystwyth, SY23 1NG. It will also travel to Bankside Gallery in London.
The Woodland Bath 2012
Colour Lithograph; 445mm x 315mm
In 2012 Paul Croft also put together a print portfolio, Collaborations: Aberystwyth Paper Press Print. He also invited me to submit a print for it and this lithograph was included.
On his web-site Paul describes it as ‘a portfolio celebrating the diversity of printmaking from traditional to digital. Each of the 30 professional artists, staff and students participating in this project have had contact with the print studio at The School of Art Aberystwyth between 2000-2012. Artists have been encouraged to be experimental and processes include combination of print media, traditional and digital processes, hybrid prints as well as more inter-disciplinary activity such as prints developing from photography, film and video. Artists were also asked to reflect upon their own practice and to produce a print that is representative of their current work’.
A few names of artists in the portfolio to ring out are: Wuon Gean Ho, Shani Rhys James, Edwina Ellis, Paul Croft, Ruth Jen Evans and Marcelle Hanselar.
Aberystwyth : Paper Press Print was accepted into the print collections of the Arizona Museum of Art in Tucson Arizona and well as the V&A Prints Collections and the University of Wales Art Collections where research is an important aspect, with emphasis particularly upon the history of graphic art, the development of new processes in etching, lithography and relief printing. The University of Wales Collection currently has an archive of over 10,000 prints, drawings.
The portfolio has been included at IMPRESS 13 , an international printmaking festival and at Hong Kong Graphic Art Fiesta 2013 which was a major international graphic art exhibition featuring prints from mainland China, Hong Kong, Macao, Australia, Bangladesh, Brazil, Canada, Ireland, Luxembourg, Portugal, UK and the USA illustrating the diversity of contemporary printmaking practice. It highlighted both thematic and cultural issues as well as more pragmatic matters such as media, technique and format. By 2010 it had developed into a major annual international printmaking exchange exhibition.