Collecting Marks: Visual Storytelling with Printmaker Bridget Jones
One of the things I love most about working in visual storytelling is the chance to step into an artist’s world and capture the quiet sparks of their creative process.
When I was commissioned to make films for Northern Print’s Glossary exhibition in 2014, I had the privilege of documenting the fascinating journey of Printmaker Bridget Jones, a printmaker and glass artist based in Northumberland. Telling stories like hers is at the heart of my passion for documenting artistic process — revealing the hidden layers behind an artist’s craft and inspiration.
Bridget Jones is perhaps best known for her stunning architectural glass commissions, but as she shares in the film, printmaking has become an equally important part of her creative life. For her, the line between glass and print is beautifully blurred, each medium informing and feeding into the other.
“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.”
Bridget’s journey into printmaking often begins like a detective story. She was inspired by an intriguing book she discovered in Gateshead Library. The book was a sort of early artist’s sketchbook — “a bit like a blog,” she says — which sparked Bridget’s own exploration of the Derwent Valley. Camera in hand, she hunted for visual clues: winding paths, lattices of leaves, carvings on stones, and subtle marks etched into tree bark. To her, landscapes are living archives of human activity and natural change, filled with marks waiting to be discovered and transformed into art.
For me, that’s the essence of visual storytelling — capturing how artists like Bridget see the world in ways most of us overlook. Her prints become layered collages of these marks and textures, each piece a fragment of memory, place, and personal history.
“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.”
One of the exciting new techniques Bridget explored for Glossary was letterpress printing. While she’d long worked with text, letterpress introduced a new physicality and tactile dimension to her work. Once printed, she could scan the letterpress text and transform it digitally, creating a personal archive of type for future projects — a perfect blend of traditional craft and modern technology.
Bridget’s creative process is beautifully fluid and intuitive. It’s a cycle of drawing, scanning, experimenting in Photoshop, and returning again to hand-drawing. There’s no rigid formula — just a persistent search for the right visual language. Even in lino printing, every tool leaves its own unique line or texture, and those subtleties are essential to her work.
“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.”
For her work in Glossary, Bridget combined two lino plates with a solar plate. Solar plate is a modern photopolymer technique that uses UV light to expose an image onto a light-sensitive plate. After washing out the plate, a relief surface remains, ready for inking and printing. It’s an innovative way to merge the traditions of printmaking with contemporary methods — a perfect metaphor for how Bridget bridges past and present in her practice.
“So you’re left with a relief plate, which is amazing. You can see the relief in many more ways than one.”
One of the things I admire most about Bridget’s approach is the freedom that printmaking gives her. Unlike architectural commissions, which are tied to specific projects, printmaking allows her to pursue ideas simply because they fascinate her. She strives to create prints that speak boldly from a distance yet invite closer inspection to reveal delicate, handcrafted details.
“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.”
Bridget Jones reminds me that everything leaves a mark — on paper, on glass, and on the world around us. Her prints are far more than images; they’re stories, fragments of landscapes, and a testament to a life spent noticing the beauty in overlooked details. And for anyone passionate about documenting artistic process, telling stories like Bridget’s is what makes this work truly meaningful.
You can see more of my work capturing artists and their creative processes on my artist films page: https://alanfentiman.co.uk/vimeo-videos/artist-films/