About the Film

This lockdown printmaking documentary film follows a project Northern Print set up in 2020 to bring its studio members together during the Covid-19 pandemic, encouraging printmakers to keep making work and learning new skills while the studio itself was closed to them. Northern Print is one of the North East’s main open-access printmaking studios, and losing that shared space, even temporarily, meant losing the thing that normally holds a whole community of printmakers together.

A Project Born From Lockdown

Working entirely over email and Zoom, the group decided to recreate a well-known painting using printmaking rather than paint, settling on LS Lowry’s Market Scene, Northern Town. The choice made sense beyond its familiarity, a busy, crowded scene chosen deliberately by a group who were all isolated at home, a small act of imagining togetherness while actually apart. Choosing a painting that everyone already knew well also meant the group had a shared reference point to work from without ever needing to meet in person to agree on it.

Working Apart, One Plate at a Time

Northern Print chose collagraph for this lockdown printmaking documentary film’s central project because the process suited working from home, building texture onto a plate from household materials like glue, string and sandpaper before it is inked and run through a press. The Lowry image was enlarged and divided into thirty-two rectangles, one for each participant, each free to interpret their section in their own style. Since everyone worked alone without seeing anyone else’s plate, nobody involved knew what the finished piece would actually look like until it was assembled, a genuine leap of faith in a shared idea none of them could actually see coming together.

Bringing It Back Together

Once the studio reopened, the group brought their individual plates together and printed them as one large composite image, reconstructing Lowry’s painting from thirty-two separate, blind contributions. That single print, more than the technique itself, became the real point of the project, a way of physically reconnecting a group who had spent months working in isolation from each other. Seeing the individual rectangles line up into a single recognisable scene, despite nobody having compared notes along the way, was as much a surprise to the participants themselves as it would be to anyone watching the film.

Filming a Project Made at a Distance

Documenting a lockdown printmaking documentary film like this one meant the usual studio filming was largely off the table too, so much of the process I was capturing had already happened over email and video calls before I could film anything directly. The moment that mattered most for filming was really the reassembly itself, the point where thirty-two separate, isolated efforts finally became visible to each other for the first time, which is a genuinely rare thing to be able to point a camera at. Most of what makes a project like this interesting on film happens in a single afternoon, even though the actual making of it stretched over months apart.

Why This Film Matters

This lockdown printmaking documentary film sits alongside the other films I have made with Northern Print’s Glossary series, but it captures something different, a studio actively finding a way to hold itself together when the thing that usually holds it together, the shared space itself, was unavailable. It remains a good example of how a genuinely collaborative artwork can come out of a period defined by everyone working apart, and a reminder that some of the most interesting creative projects happen not despite constraints but because of them.