Emily Crookshank: Art Focus: Floor 2
Accomplished printmaker Emily Crookshank is excited. Her life is in transition. She is taking her fidelity to art and nature to another level, realising that individual and collective potential are interconnected.
Engaging with her new ‘live work’ community in Thames mead, an urban place with ancient woodland and an established travelling populace, Emily has found a space to set up her own, long waited for, print studio where she will run collaborative workshops focusing on art, environment and community.
Emily is not the only one feeling good - CIRCLE are exited too. As well as the larger etchings we are showing a hot off the press series of place specific mono prints inspired by the Cornish landscape.
The etching process is a disciplined art with many restrictions. Once mastered, the artist can conjure very subtle shades of expression. Working in a series is the printmakers norm - each print is born from the one preceding it and like a line of footprints in the sand, every print is slightly different.
Crookshank spends chunks of her time in the wilder landscapes of Britain and like the notable printmaker Norman Ackroyd she shares a passion for Scotland, Mull and the Hebrides - describing the rhyme of the landscape, firstly, with drawing - the most spontaneous form of expression: the drawings are memento of her engagement with nature.
Emily’s prints are not likenesses but abstract forms born from the printing plate, although her black inked densities evoke feelings of time passing time - the inner light of the land.
With so many images posted on social media we forget how special the materiality of original art is - the viewer needs to engage face to face with the work in a gallery - to be immersed in its mystery.
Handmade prints using time honoured techniques have a depth and sensuality which can never be encountered by looking at a small-screen facsimile.