Great art supported by great people.
Iain Sloan. A Master of Fine Printmaking, Iain has been teaching printmaking for many years at all educational levels. He is experienced in most printmaking disciplines and has a particular interest in Etching and Lino cutting. He works primarily in Painting, Drawing and Printmaking and as a lifelong educator, is keen to encourage others to get involved in visual art. He set up Iron Press in 2014 and opened it to the public in September 2015.
Jenny McCabe Jenny McCabe is a printmaker working with metal plate etchings and collagraph plates. She uses decisive mark-making to breathe life into the plates, turning a simple piece of metal or card into something new and intriguing. She uses messy gestural lines to capture the energy and movement of her subjects. Jenny uses hand cutting techniques to turn her etched metal plates into intricate shapes playing with compositions and the embossed impressions the plate makes on paper.
Julie Evans. Julie’s printmaking career began at St Johns York where she did a four-year honours degree in Art and Geography. Her focus was on etching and aquatint and was heavily influenced by my love of wild high places. In the seven years since working at Iron Press Printmaking, she has been catching up with all the latest developments in the world of print and found some brand-new techniques to enjoy such as photo etching and Mokuhanga. At Iron Press Julie mainly teaches Mokuhanga, linocut and monotype but in her own work she likes to flit between all techniques as and when she chooses.
Jenny Hack. Print making has been an important part of Jenny's artistic activity since she went to art college over forty years ago. She is now retired but most of her working life was spent as a paintings conservator, working in museums and art galleries preserving and so extending the life of other artists’ work. It’s probably due to this experience that she is so interested in the materials, methods and techniques used to develop visual ideas. Iron Press workshops provide Jenny with ample opportunities to explore the different effects and to share discoveries with newcomers to printmaking.
Caroline Stow. Caroline's work is rooted in an interest in ecology and our absolute reliance on the natural world. She makes extensive use of observational drawing as a basis for ideas, although many final images are quite abstract. She is interested in making as an explorative process, which melds together materiality and slow thinking. She has both exhibited and taught widely since she began printmaking 8 years ago.
Janet studied Printmaking at Canterbury and Camberwell Colleges of Art in the 1980s, then re-discovered print when she moved to Lancaster in 2016 and found Iron Press. She has been printing there ever since. Janet is drawn to Industrial Landscape, but also elements found in the natural landscape too. Whatever the subject, drawing is key to the process. She works in Drypoint, Monotype, Collagraph and Etching. She finds mixing these disciplines particularly exciting and liberating – each process has something the others lack and she enjoys the spontaneity that combining them can bring.
Exploring the processes involved in the medium of wood engraving has been a wonderful discovery for me. The intricate images that can be produced with this form of relief printmaking demand very slow, careful engraving of a design onto the end grain of a wood block, (such as box wood, maple, lemon wood) with the engraved areas appearing white on printing. A variety of lines, tones and textures can be created on the remaining areas in relief on the block through the use of specialised tiny engraving tools. I love walking, (carrying plenty of art supplies and coffee!), then translating drawings, paintings, photo’s into images on a wood block that reflect something of that personal vision. It is a privilege to share with others my enthusiasm and learning about this exacting, beautiful form of printmaking.