2006 Menier Gallery
Inevitably, there was enthusiasm for a 2006 show, and we took the Menier Gallery again. It cost £4912 for three weeks, and 16 artists took part. We presented ourselves as a group of artist-printmakers, and we showed mainly print, but also drawing, painting and 3D work.
We worked hard on publicity and had a 20-page catalogue printed, with a forward by Mike Taylor, and two publicity slots which Anna sold to help cover the costs. The show cost 301.98 each between 16 of us, and as I’d budgeted £313 each, there was a refund. Sales were £1512.50.
Mike Taylor’s introduction to the 2006 catalogue
Artists are involved in a continual search for language. To express the particular and personal, the social and political; to reveal structure, celebrate activity, pose questions, point fingers and generally exault in the absurd, the beautiful and the ugly. In contemporary life, an artist has need of many means of expression.
Artists using print have access to an ever-increasing array of such languages, ones rooted in history and expanded by the newest of technologies. The printed multiple image has many guises and disguises.
Printmaking’s languages, its processes, techniques and materials, can provide perfect vehicles for a Modernist reading of art; a one-to-one unifying of hand and eye, head and heart, art and craft. A truth to materials. Yet the ‘mechanization of an image’ can appear to create a void between the physical and the cerebral, where the found and acquired has equal value to the made and fashioned.
The artists in this exhibition are all engaged with these languages, revelling in an expansive response to old techniques and new technologies. All language, whether written, verbal or visual, is there to communicate ideas, which when expressed in succinct and poetic ways, underpin the work and engage the audience.
Michael Taylor 2006.
