About the Film

In October 2015, Northern Print took printmaking out of the studio and onto one of Newcastle’s most famous streets. As part of NewcastleGateshead’s Conversion Festival — a city-wide arts programme tied to the Rugby World Cup — eleven print studios from across the UK came together to create a single 33-metre linocut, officially confirmed as a Guinness World Record. This public art documentary film follows the event from the early stages of preparation through to the moment the print is finally revealed.

The design was created by illustrator and printmaker Sara Ogilvie, whose work had to be adapted so that it could be carved and printed in sections across a vast distance of paper. Alongside the main print run, twenty rugby-ball-shaped lino panels were made by artists, students and players representing the Rugby World Cup’s competing nations — each one becoming part of the final assembled work.

How It Was Made

Printing a 33-metre linocut on a public street required a degree of improvisation that felt closer to engineering than to conventional printmaking. The printing mechanism was an adapted rugby scrum machine — modified so that volunteers, including members of Tynedale rugby club, could push it along the length of the paper, applying even pressure across the carved lino surface. Students from Northumbria University helped with inking and registration, managing the kind of logistical complexity that rarely shows up in a studio practice.

One of the participants described the process as “a bit like a game of consequences” — each section of the print depending on the one before it, the whole only becoming visible as the paper was slowly peeled back. Another described the purpose of bringing the work outside: “So much of what we do happens behind studio doors… letting them stumble upon it while doing their shopping.” That idea — of art finding its audience rather than waiting for it — was central to what Northern Print was doing that day on Grey Street.

The previous world record had stood at 24.5 metres. Northern Print’s print, at 33 metres, broke it comfortably. At the end of the day, one contributor said: “It makes people feel like they’ve played a part in something bigger — and everyone loves being creative.”

Filming a Public Art Event

Filming public art events is a particular kind of documentary challenge. Unlike a studio shoot or a controlled interview setting, a public artwork unfolds in real time, in real space, with passers-by, weather, logistics and chance all playing a part. There is no second take on the moment the scrum machine rolls across the lino for the first time, or on the faces of people stopping on the pavement to watch something unexpected happen.

As a public art documentary filmmaker, I work by staying close to the people doing the work rather than stepping back to capture the spectacle. The interest is in the hands, the decisions, the quiet concentration between moments of action. With Scrum Down, Print Forward, that meant moving between the inking stations and the printing mechanism, between the students managing registration and the volunteers pushing the machine, while also catching the reactions of the public encountering the work for the first time. The film needed to hold the mechanics of the event and its atmosphere together — to show how it was made without losing sight of why it mattered.

Northern Print’s decision to stage a public art event on Grey Street, rather than within the studio or gallery, changed the relationship between the work and its audience entirely. A public art documentary film made in that context has to do something similar — to stay open to what arrives rather than only following a predetermined structure.

About Northern Print

Northern Print is Newcastle’s dedicated printmaking studio and gallery, supporting artists at all levels of practice. I have made a number of public art documentary films with Northern Print, including documentary portraits of printmakers Julian Meredith, Tom Hammick, Stephen Chambers and Katherine Jones, made as part of the Glossary exhibition series in 2014. The Scrum Down film sits alongside those as a record of a different kind of Northern Print project — larger in scale, public-facing, and tied to a specific moment in the city’s cultural life.