Katherine Jones ‘Collagraph and block print’ course review

http://www.rableydrawingcentre.com

Last weekend we were very lucky to have Katherine Jones in the print room running a course on one of her favoured methods – collagraph and block print.

Katherine currently has a solo exhibition at the Rabley gallery, ‘Cover and Keep Safe’, and it was great for everyone on the course to have the added bonus of being able to reference a body of work directly and get an insight into the evolution and formation of her images, through the combination of process, context and exploration of concept.

Collagraph printing is a very direct way of working, you can draw onto mount card and get working straight away: scratching, peeling, sprinkling, sticking. In the print room Katherine gave handy tips for inking, wiping and printing to get the best out of the plates.

Katherine likes using this method as it retains the drawing at it’s heart, the initial drawing does not become one or two steps removed through various processes. It also has the added benefit of being non-toxic and fairly quick in the plate making process, even quicker in Katherine’s case as she has developed a way of working that does not require her to seal her plates.

Katherine was an extremely generous and enthusiastic tutor, we hope she will come back and run another course here again soon. The group learnt a lot about the huge potential and versatility of this process and produced masses of prints by the end of the two days – and I think this will just be the tip of the collagraph iceberg…