About This Printmaking Documentary Film Series

Glossary was a 2014 exhibition at Northern Print, the printmaking studio and gallery in Newcastle upon Tyne, bringing together a group of established and emerging printmakers from across the UK. Rather than build the show around a single technique or theme, Northern Print set out to demonstrate the sheer range of contemporary printmaking, and I was commissioned to make a short printmaking documentary film with each artist, one for every process on display.

Between them, the seven films cover printmaking in nearly all its common forms: woodcut, potato print, monotype, collagraph, solar plate, screenprint and wood engraving. That spread was deliberate. Northern Print wanted visitors to Glossary to come away understanding that printmaking is not one technique but a whole family of them, each with its own tools, timings and temperament, and a printmaking documentary film felt like the right way to show that range rather than simply describe it in a wall label.

Seven Techniques, Filmed the Same Way

Each film in the series follows the same broad approach: staying close to the studio, the materials and the artist’s own hands, with as little narration or explanation as possible. I shot the whole series on a Panasonic AF101 and GH2, both early micro four-thirds cameras that let me work quietly and stay out of the way in what were often small, cluttered studio spaces. There is no voiceover across any of the seven films. The work is legible enough on its own, and the aim throughout this printmaking documentary film series was to let each process speak for itself rather than have me speak for it.

Filming seven different artists working in seven different techniques over a short period taught me a lot about the overlap between printmaking and documentary filmmaking themselves. Both depend on transferring something, an image, an idea, a moment, from one surface to another, and both rely on patience with a process that rarely goes entirely to plan. Editing a film is not so different from pulling a print: you make choices about pressure, timing and what to leave out, and you rarely know exactly what you have until it is finished.

Why Northern Print Commissioned a Printmaking Documentary Film for Each Artist

A finished print, on its own, rarely shows the decisions and false starts behind it. Glossary’s curators wanted visitors to understand not just what each artist had made but how, and a short film sitting alongside each print in the gallery let people watch a woodblock being carved or a collagraph plate being built up in layers before they ever saw the finished piece. That pairing of process and object is part of why I keep being drawn back to printmaking as a subject. It gives a documentary filmmaker something concrete and visual to follow from start to finish, in a way that many other creative processes do not.

Northern Print continues to support printmakers through studio access, education and exhibitions from their gallery in Newcastle. You can find out more about their current programme at northernprint.org.uk.