About the Film

I was commissioned by Northern Print to make a solar plate documentary film as part of their 2014 Glossary exhibition, a series of short portraits of printmakers from across the UK. This one follows Bridget Jones, a printmaker and glass artist based in Northumberland who is perhaps best known for her architectural glass commissions. As she explains in the film, printmaking has become just as central to her creative life, with glass and print constantly feeding into one another.

Finding Marks in the Landscape

Bridget’s route into printmaking began almost like a detective story, sparked by an old artist’s sketchbook she found in Gateshead Library, a bit like a blog, as she describes it. It sent her out into the Derwent Valley with a camera, searching for winding paths, lattices of leaves, carvings on stones and marks etched into bark.

I love found objects. Things that you pick up on the roadside or the beach. Printmaking offers you sometimes the chance to create a kind of archive of mark making and random bits of imagery that you can find and use later.

To Bridget, landscapes are living archives of human activity and natural change, full of marks waiting to be noticed and reworked into something new. Her prints become layered collages of exactly this material, each one a fragment of memory, place and personal history.

Between Glass and Print

Bridget speaks in the film about how fluid the boundary is between her two main practices.

I’m known as someone who makes glass for architectural spaces, but now I also call myself a printmaker. It’s always been a two-way process because you can print on the glass, you can print from the glass, you can make prints that become part of the designs for the glass.

For Glossary, one of the new techniques she explored was letterpress. She had long worked with text, but letterpress brought a new physicality and tactile quality to it. Once printed, she scanned the letterpress type and reworked it digitally, building a personal archive of type for future projects, a small but telling example of how her practice moves easily between traditional craft and digital tools.

Lino, Solar Plate and the Search for Clarity

For her Glossary print, Bridget combined two lino plates with a solar plate, a photopolymer technique that uses UV light to expose an image onto a light-sensitive surface before it is washed out to leave a relief ready for inking. It is a technique that sits somewhere between traditional printmaking and contemporary process, and it is the one this solar plate documentary film spends the most time watching happen, staying close to the plates and the press rather than just the finished print.

For me, lino is a bit like drawing and using tools, which is a sort of mark-making thing, but every different tool has a different mark. And the marks had to be right for this particular print.

A Fluid Creative Process

Bridget describes her process as a cycle rather than a fixed formula: drawing, scanning, experimenting in Photoshop, then returning to hand-drawing again. Printmaking, unlike her architectural commissions, gives her the freedom to follow an idea simply because it interests her, aiming for prints that read clearly from a distance but reward close inspection with handcrafted detail.

When I’m making a print, I’m always searching for some sort of clarity, for something that reads from ten metres away, but also something that has lovely details when you get right close up to it.

Filming Bridget Jones

As with the other short films I made for Glossary, my approach here was observational, staying close to the plates, the ink and the press rather than directing the process. Making a solar plate documentary film about a practice this varied meant following Bridget between studio, darkroom and press, and trusting that the small physical details, a scraped edge, a re-inked roller, a test pull held up to the light, would carry as much of the story as anything said on camera.

Bridget’s work sits alongside other Glossary portraits I made the same year, including Tom Hammick’s monotype practice and Katherine Jones’s collagraph work, each one a different route into the same question of how printmakers find and repeat a mark.