Pulpa Exhibition

I'm taking part in a group exhibition at the R K Burt Gallery in Southwark. It has been organised by some of the PhD students at BCU. All the work is paper-based, R K Burt being a paper merchants.

I went down to help with the instal. The gallery is at the front of the paper merchants. It looks like it was formally a shop and is on two floors.

The prints I decided to show at the exhibition were 'The Fireman and Flash Gordon' and 'The Ice Skaters'.

My MA Final Show

For the purposes of MA assessment, I am calling this my 'Final Show', but it will continue in some form until the late Autumn (whilst the Dovecote and Cowhouse are open to the public), and I fully intend to continue the project for some time to come. I have stories that I still want to illustrate as prints and I want to create an installation piece with the metal frames.

Setting up the 'MA Final Show'

So far my work has cohabited with the Cow House's other more permanent occupants. In order to be able to present my prints in a more professional way for the MA assessment, I needed to clear out the Cow House as much as possible. This involved transporting all the gardeners' tools and the Society's display boards to the Dovecote.

The corner of the Cow House that I have hitherto not used needed to be cleared, which proved to be a difficult task. I had to load the large water-filled bottles onto the wheelbarrow and transport them round the back of the garden by the compost bins.

After that, the pile of bricks in the corner needed to me moved. Fortunately I am neither arachnophobic nor molluscophobic, as there were a considerable number of spiders and slugs that had to be evicted.

I decided to move the pigeon holes to this corner as it made more sense for this to be by the door as people come in and leave.

I have reinstated the 'Shufflebotham Stores' print in the space created. Although this was one of my earlier prints and taken directly from an old photograph, it has created a lot of conversations about shops that were in Moseley, so I feel it has a place for the time being.

Hanging the latest prints in the Cow House.

The last three prints I have produced have come directly from stories donated by visitors to the Dovecote and Cow House since the exhibition opened at the end of June. I wanted to put these on display so that people visiting over the next couple of busy weekends can see them and, hopefully, be inspired to leave their stories. I have also invited the contributors back to have a look at them (see Moseley Stories blog).

I needed to take down two of the existing prints to accommodate the new ones, so I decided to remove 'Runner Beans', a print I have never been that happy with due to a thin aquatint, and 'Shufflebotham's Stores' which was taken directly from an old photograph.

 The new prints are 'Night Sister', 'The Fireman and Flash Gordon' and 'Moseley Pearl'.

After next weekend's opening, once the gardeners have finished on Sunday, I will need to clear the remaining corner of the Cow House to create a more professional exhibition space ready for MA assessment and a 'Private View' the following weekend. There is a great deal to clear and some particularly heavy water storage bottles. I am hoping I will have some help to do this.

Printing the 'Moseley Pearl' plate

The latest plate to be completed was the 'Moseley Pearl'. I had some difficulties with etching the aquatint stages due to a problem with the water supply in the print room. Instead of the initial 'bite' in the acid being 30 seconds, it was more like 2 minutes as I was unable to wash the plate straight away. I knew this would affect the tonal range of the aquatint, but there wasn't time to start the plate from scratch (having already spent several days on it).

So I had to go ahead and finish the etching and hope that I could rescue the plate at the inking stage.
As the background was darker than I had planned and some of the detail was lost, I used a burnisher to work into the aquatint to bring back some of the highlights.

I tried inking the plate up in several different shades of blue/green so that I had a range of prints to work on. I wiped the plate thoroughly to try and maximise the tonal quality that was there.

I then added spot colour to the prints using watercolour washes. I am still not that happy with the finished prints. When I have more time I would like to redo the whole plate.

Completing the latest lino cut prints

I've spent the week producing lino cuts for the quotes and printing them. I haven't recorded much of this process before, even though it is such an important part of the overall project. I wanted the time and effort it takes me to cut the words and the care and attention of the printing process to reflect the respect I have for each individual's contribution to the project.

Finished Print for The Fireman and Flash Gordon

I have completed the print based on Geoff Jones' story. The main colour is a metallic green/grey with red spot colour picking out the fire and Ming's coat in the comic book 'thought bubble'. I am happy with the treatment of the background. I feel there is enough to get a sense of the complex machinery, without overwhelming the figure or the intricate detail of the comic graphics.

The Night Sister

I have completed the etching and aquatint based on Ken Watson's story about his mother who was a night sister at Moseley Children's Hospital. I am quite pleased how it has turned out, particularly the illumination of the windows and the car headlights, which was quite tricky to achieve.

I haven't put any spot colour on this print, as I don't feel it would look right for a night time scene.

Researching more stories

I have been undertaking research for further stories, with a view to embarking on more copper plate aquatints next week. The horse bridle donated by Dominic Gordon led me to think back to a lecture I attended by Janet Berry from the Local History Archive. She spoke about how the introduction of horse drawn trams that went into the city, proved to be a turning point for women in the area, as they could safely travel to jobs in Birmingham. She has sent me one photograph to start with and a quote from her talk, but I need to find out more.



 "Women passengers were indeed fewer than men, but still frequent passengers, though more likely to sit downstairs where smoking was banned.  Women’s voluminous skirts hampered them climbing to the top deck, but ‘decency panels’ protected them once there.  Trams, then, were ‘symbols of emancipation’ and ‘helped ‘shape a new female presence in the public environment’, giving some Moseley women a freedom they had not enjoyed before."

Ken Watson's story about his mother who was a night sister at Moseley Hall Hospital (see post on http://moseleystories.blogspot.co.uk/) is very promising. I am hoping Ken will manage to find a photo of his Mum, but in the meantime I've been sourcing other images for a potential print.

Ken told me that his car was the Ford Anglia before the classic model with the slopped back window, so I am hoping this is the correct one.

I have also been looking at nurses' uniforms from the period. From what I can see a sister's uniform did not vary that much. In the picture below, I believe the nurse on the left is a sister.

I found the advert below, which depicts Moseley Hall as a Children's Hospital at the beginning of the 20th century. Most of the buildings which now surround the old hall now are post 1960s. From Ken's description of the large trees that were in the grounds, I don't think the Hospital would have altered much during the first half of the century.

I went to Moseley Hall Hospital to take some photos of the frontage, which is still very much as it was back in the 1960's.

As the story takes place in the late evening, I went back to photograph the hall later on. Unfortunately the original building does not appear to be used much in the evening, so only one light was on, but it did give me an idea of what the illumination of the building in the evening would have looked like.

I also took some shots of my daughter in the pose I would like for the figure of the Night Sister as she turns to wave goodbye.

I have been looking again at Paula Rego's etchings, this time to see how she dealt with night scenes. 'Secrets and Stories' and 'Encampment' both show the way she uses the tonal range of aquatint to depict the sharp contrasts and subtler grades of twilight illuminated by lamps or camp fire.

Recently I have been looking at the work of Eric Ravilious, particularly the lithographs he produced when working as a war artist for the Royal Navy. The set of prints he produced of submarine crew show a wonderful portrayal of pools of light within the confined space of the cabins, such as 'Diving Controls 1' below.

I produced a collage of the images I have sourced for the print of 'Night Sister' to get the composition right. I then traced the image using a range of tones, so that I could work out the layers of aquatint and achieved the desired effect of a night time scene.