Pressing Matters Issue 13

As you can see with our cover choice, we’ve decided to ‘bring the brightness’ with this issue. That doesn’t mean all of the art featured in this issue’s pages are day-glo, more that we want the publication to be a positive and uplifting moment for our readers in increasingly uncertain times. Whether it’s the bold and bright works of Emma Fisher, Kate Clarke and Hannah Brown, fizzing with energy and brilliance, or the surprising colour choices of Robert Tavener’s landscape prints, there’s something about using bright colours that makes you smile and breathe in the vibrancy of the artwork a little longer.

Early in the planning for this issue, we were lucky to visit print legend Norman Ackroyd at his London studio (socially distanced of course) and learnt how the normally well-travelled artist had been revisiting his trips to the far edges of the UK via his sketchbooks. Drawing from memories and the feelings that his sketches evoke allows him to travel back to these amazing places – a bit of a magic trick in our time of restrictions and regulations.

And with our printed work being made increasingly from our homes, it was exciting to talk to illustrator Rosie Leech whose One Inch Etchings project sees her making mini prints from her home studio at the smallest of scales – tiny masterpieces that conjure up so much more feeling than the small marks made in creating them. We are all considering what we have and how we can use it to make work – Andreas Brekke’s article talks about just that notion – embracing the limits, making the work even better.