Bespoke Drypoint Workshop

Teaching a workshop for Chris Smith of the 5 Dot Collective Cobden Chambers

Private View West Yorkshire Print Workshop 10th April

Still Navigating

Michelle Keegan – solo exhibition [i'd better get busy!!!!!]
11 April – 16 May 2015

Printmaker Michelle Keegan is the winner of this year’s Flourish Award- for excellence in printmaking- and one of our newest members at West Yorkshire Print Workshop. A Slade School of Art graduate, Michelle’s work in multi-plate etching is minimalist and monochromatic, depicting a series of abstract layers, memories of spaces, places and landscapes.
West Yorkshire Print Workshop
75A Huddersfield Road
Mirfield
WF14 8AT

Flourish Award Winner by Hilarie Stelfox Feature Writer Huddersfield Examiner

Printmaker Michelle Keegan is the winner of a national print-making award.

The West Yorkshire Print Workshop, based in Mirfield, has a national following in the art community.

Its Flourish Award for Excellence, now in its sixth year, attracts entries from both Yorkshire and further afield.

This year’s winner Michelle Keegan, a Slade School of Art graduate, is course co-ordinator for fine art at the Central College in Nottingham. She acquired connections with this area when invited to be part of an art show in Barnsley this summer to celebrate the Grand Depart of the Tour de France in Yorkshire.

But she learned of Flourish through her membership of Printmakingonline, an internet organisation that brings together print-makers to show their work.

Three of her prints can currently be seen at the workshop’s gallery on Huddersfield Road in an exhibition of short-listed artists (ending on November 15).

Part of Michelle’s prize is use of the workshops’ studios and she is now planning to make regular forays to Mirfield to develop her etching techniques. She will also be staging a solo exhibition at Huddersfield Art Gallery next year – another Flourish reward.

Michelle describes her minimalist, monochromatic work as “abstract landscape” and says it is influenced by her nomadic lifestyle.

“I have lived in a lot of places,” she explained, “and my work is to do with memory and transit between places”.

She has been etching in black and white for 30 years and specialises in multi-plate printing but says that winning the chance to use the print workshop’s facilities might encourage her to try using some colour. But she’s not making any promises.

West Yorkshire Print Workshop is a charity and was founded in 1981 as the Kirklees Arts Space Society. It opened to the public as a gallery space in 1984.

In 1995 it became Eastthorpe Visual Arts and adopted its present name in 2004. It is a Regularly Funded Organisation of the Arts Council England, Yorkshire.

Grey

Currently showing in Grey at Harrington Mill Studios Leopold Street Nottingham NG10 4QE

Curated by David Manley

FLOURISH 2014: Award for Excellence in Printmaking

Feeling very privileged and honoured to have won the Flourish Award For Excellence in Printmaking.

FLOURISH 2014:
 Award for Excellence in Printmaking

Saturday 27 September – 15 November 2014

We are pleased to announce the details of our annual Flourish exhibition, which showcases excellence in printmaking. Now in its sixth year, having been established in 2009 to champion printmakers working across the county, a new Flourish Printmaker of the Year must be chosen for 2014.

The Flourish group show, opening on 27 September, brings together a wide range of prints made by artists in the running for this year’s award, as selected by our independent panel of judges. Fine art printmakers June Russell and Ian Rawlinson, along with Huddersfield Art Gallery’s Grant Scanlan and Hot Bed Press’ Sean Rorke, have carefully considered all artworks entered from all over the county to come up with this fantastic shortlist. Included will be linocuts, screen prints, etchings, drypoints, collagraphs and monoprints.

The Flourish Printmaker of the Year 2014 will be announced at our private view and OPEN event on Friday 10 October. For more information about the event, please see below.

The winner of the Flourish Award will receive a year’s free membership at West Yorkshire Print Workshop – including 100 free printmaking hours – as well as a solo print exhibition at Huddersfield Art Gallery in Autumn 2015. Shortlisted artists for the Flourish Award 2014 are:

•   Lesley Birch

•   Shelley Burgoyne

•   Hester Cox

•   Pam Grimmond

•   Sarah Harris

•   Brian Hindmarch

•   Scarlette Homeshaw

•   Michelle Keegan

•   Dorrie King

•   Moira McTague

•   Stef Mitchell

•   Helen Peyton

•   Trevor Pollard

Geraldine Smith

Green Door Printmaking Studio - International Print Exchange 2014 Exhibition

International Print Exchange 2014 14th October to 10th November 2014  You are invited to the opening of our International Print Exchange 2014 exhibition showing from 14th October to 10th November 2014. This exhibition celebrates our 6th exchange, showcasing the prints received this year produced by 86 printmakers from all over the world! Friday 17th October 2014, 3pm - 7pm, Free You and your guests are invited to the opening of this exhibition! We will be hosting a talk & tour of the exhibition as part of this opening. Our studios will also be open and available to view. Light refreshments will also be provided, so please come along! Exhibiton showing: Banks Mill Studios (foyer), 71 Bridge Street, Derby, DE1 3LB. Exhibition open to the public week days 11am - 5pm; Saturday 18 October and Sat 1 & Sun 2 Nov 11am-3pm.

The Romney Marsh Visitor Centre Gallery

What goes up must come down,last day of the exhibition 
with thanks to Mark Keegan,Jayne Egginton,Liz Grant,Tom Hackett and everyone who came to see it

The Romney Marsh Visitor Centre Gallery

Last day at the gallery its been very cathartic doing a 'home' exhibition

Review of A Place Between by Tom Hackett

A major solo exhibition of prints

Venue

The Gallery at Romney Marsh Visitor Centre Dymchurch Road New Romney Kent TN28 8AY Friday to Sunday 10.00am - 4.00pm

Location

South East England

Place is a curious notion. It occupies a perceptual position somewhere in between the personal and the collectively known and perceived.  Inevitably Art that deals with place and landscape, be it mimetic, elucidatory or dilatory in strategy  has an over arching challenge to overcome. How does it deal with place in a ‘fresh’ manner and avoid all the dismissive ‘seen it all before-ness’ that besets this noble quest.

Familiarity as the adage goes ‘breeds contempt’. And for me art needs to feel ‘fresh’ for the dual sanity of its audience and creator alike. By fresh I guess I mean less predictable. Perhaps I could even supplement this call for freshness with a further notion of ‘refreshing’ and all that that can imply.

A work can be highly mimetic and yet fresh, taking something familiar to us, but catalyzing some kind of re-appraisal through its less familiar treatment. At the other end a body of work can also be highly dilatory and tangential, yet lacking in other redeeming features. So for me the depiction of the landscape in 2 dimensions necessitates a multi pronged attack.

One way to avoid the pitfalls of the literal is via abstraction. But this is easier said than done as meaningful abstraction is a very tough nut to crack. Particularly when dealing with place. How does work keep a connection with subject when extrapolated? When you look at the impressive contents of this show, you quickly realise Michelle Keegan is a sincere enough artist to rise to this challenge.

These prints are subtle, but not subtle to the point of invisibility. They are charged enough to make you look and to look slowly. And as your gaze lingers their elegance and poetry rises gently to the surface. This work, like much work of sincerity, is by definition the antithesis of ‘in-yer-face’ art making.

The artist takes forward the time tested ground of the grid structure to create a layered sense of place. Shapes, and forms, which appear at times to evoke the imagery of direct rubbings, are meticulously etched and printed into carefully nuanced lines which overlap to create a sensual essence of texture and interweaving.

This is where the original departure points taken from breakwaters, pylons, and drainage dykes, start to breath a new life within this abstraction. Not as literal depictions of a place deep within the memory banks of the artist’s childhood. But as suggestion. As ghosts of a place, both ‘sort of’ familiar, and also elusive. Abstraction for me can be seen as a composting process, where the original form mulches down and emerges as something else.

The most disappointing thing for me would be to see a marriage of a show and a place which merely re-iterates its origins. Shows in this kind of locality can frequently be banal. Indeed it is a bold step to find such a show of contemporary art set in a Wildlife Site. But while this show is physically sited amongst its departure points, this work is far from mere replication in its methodology.

These works through their lack of referential scale, (in relation to their original inspirational departure point of subject matter), enable a joyful fluidity between the landscape as viewed from a hot air balloon and the microscopic. Suggesting in part the internal landscape of the human body or other organic structures on a sub cellular level. Dark blobs suggest pools of non-specific visceral liquids, carefully toned striated patterns could be read as both distant wheat fields or hair cells up close. This dilatory approach is rewarding as it keep you lingering at the image.

These are also executed with high levels of precision and skill, by an artist who respects her media and the integrity of the wider discipline. What this means to us as viewers, is that we can enjoy these bewitching forms and structures and undergo a transcendental landscape fix, without being derailed by shoddy distractions or the overtly literal.  With many artists varying degrees of crude workmanship are part of their governing aesthetics. These meticulously executed prints show Keegan as a artist wholly in charge of her creative arsenal, and as an artist with a highly attuned understanding of both abstraction and what it means to make ‘good’ work in a holistic sense.

Visit this show and you can get a dual fix of bewitching landscape in the real, and a rewardingly complex and highly attuned engagement with the complexities of place and landscape as subject. These prints treat curiosity and dislocation of place with the respect it deserves.

International Print Exchange (IPE) 2014

Editioning 10 today

The Romney Marsh Visitor Centre Gallery

26 prints hung with my brother today at the beautiful gallery space at the Romney Marsh visitor Centre

Exhibiting Prints - A Place Between
2nd August-29th August
At the Romney Marsh Visitor Centre
Dymchurch Road
New Romney
Kent
TN28 8AY
Opening Times
Friday to Sunday 10.00am - 4.00pm
Meet the Artist talks on August 3rd and 29th 11am-2pm http://keeganarts.com 

International Print Exchange [2009-2014]

http://ipe.greendoor-printmaking.co.uk/viewing-artist.php?Michelle%20Keegan

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.402017716497913.97618.111767358856285&type=3

Its been great being part of the exchange initiated and organised by Green Door Printmaking studio

Romney Marsh Visitor Centre

In Memoriam

After over a years work ten prints exploring relationship with place, loss and memorial are ready for editioning