Click images above to view gallery
As part of the Dalziel Project, contemporary printmakers have been collaborating with researchers, exploring the archive in the British Museum (see more here). This has generated new work in dialogue with the Dalziels. Bethan Stevens recently wrote about this in Printmaking Today, focusing on the recent Dalziel-related work of Neil Bousfield, Louise Hayward, Chris Pig and Peter S. Smith: you can read the full piece on the Printmaking Today website, and here we take the opportunity to showcase the new work, alongside the archival images.
Since exploring the Dalziel Archive, Pig has extensively researched Victorian printmaking. He invested in a set of nineteenth-century tools, and experimented with William James Linton’s techniques for protecting the drawn surface of a woodblock while cutting (using paper to mask the block, with a small hole to cut within). Pig writes, ‘my working practice has changed. I now work up every composition first in boxwood with the Victorian tools’. In the gallery above, you can see Pig’s diptych Tiggy’s Funeral, the burial of a goldfish, which demonstrates his new approach: first working in boxwood, then remaking the design in lino-cut. Pig’s design is reminiscent of many Victorian depictions of burial in its melancholy hilarity; see, for instance, Dalziel’s engraving of Edward Lear’s design of a man shutting a woman in a box/coffin.
You can read a report of our artists’ workshop by Simon Brett in Multiples (May 2017), which details contributions by all the attendees: Hugo Chapman, Sheila O’Connell and Isabel Seligman (British Museum); George Mind (University of Sussex); and printmakers Alex Binnie, Simon Brett, Peter Lawrence, Keith Pettitt, Maggie Storm and Jazmin Velasco.