OUT OF THE WEST

Four Etchers: Ian Chamberlain, Ros Ford, Jemma Gunning, David Sully

It is an unusual pleasure for a gallery in the East of England to introduce a group of four distinguished printmakers from the West. Based in and around Bristol, these artists are friends and colleagues who share sensibilities and a love for the medium of etching. There is a shared impulse to record, initially through drawing, the changing technological, architectural, historical and natural heritage.

Ian Chamberlain's work reinterprets manmade structures as monuments within the landscape, architectural metaphors of past and current technological achievements. These have included the Goonhilly Earth Station, the Lovell Telescope, the Maunsell naval forts and the Atlantic Wall of WWII German defences along the west coast of Europe. He has been Senior Lecturer in MA Multi-Disciplinary Printmaking at the University of the West of England (UWE) since 2007 while his work has been exhibited internationally and included in prestigious UK collections.

Ros Ford is a painter and printmaker based in Bristol. Inspired by the unordered and overlooked, her work is mostly about functional structures and buildings that are often unnoticed. Her etchings are often based on hidden industrial landscapes close to her home and studio as well as in Wales and Italy. She makes drawings and photographs on location that she develops into series of prints and paintings. The current selection was inspired by a fellowship in Venice. She works at BV Studios in Bristol and has won national prizes and awards for her work. Her prints and paintings are exhibited and held in public and private collections in the UK and internationally.

As an artist Jemma Gunning specialises in intaglio and lithographic processes to document our fading cultural heritage. The action of acid on metal plate or stone for her resonates with the impact humanity has on the planet; but her visual interpretations of decay and dereliction have intimations of hope in the signs of reclamation of the waste lands by nature. As a graduate in 2018 of the Multi-Disciplinary Printmaking MA course at UWE she was awarded a research fellowship at the City and Guilds of London Art School. Since then she has developed her practice, exhibited nationally and internationally, working part-time as a technical print instructor at UWE and running workshops through the Bristol Print Collective that she co-founded in 2016.

David Sully is a graduate of the Royal Academy Schools and for the last 25 years has been Senior Technical Instructor in Etching at the UWE and an expert in aquatint and chine collé. His aim is to retain the spontaneity of his quick sketchbook drawings of the landscape in his etchings. Increasingly his fluid depictions of wind and water are conveyed in sugarlift aquatint, which can be applied on location by brush directly on to the copper plate. Back in the studio a resist covers the plate, the aquatint is 'lifted' in water and the plate can be etched.