Anne Desmet RA
Anne Desmet is one of the most original talents in contemporary artist-printmaking, and only the third wood engraver ever to be elected to the Royal Academy (RA). She brings to her prints a unique imagination and an abundance of skill and technical expertise. She uses print to depict the evolution of urban landscapes, from ancient cities like Rome, to London and New York.
The aspirations of humanity run through her work. She explores themes of transformation, with her dramatic use of light and shade showing the effects of time on architecture.Deriving from the early inspiration of Metamorphoses, the Roman poet Ovid’s passionate tales of human and divine shape shifting, and Mondrian’s sequential images of cherry trees gradually transmuted into abstracted designs, Anne Desmet’s work has consistently displayed a fascination with time, transformation, and their relationship to lived experience.
Central to her work since 1989 has been an unblinking examination of human aspiration through the depiction of architecture and the building of cities. The resulting images go well beyond view making, with her most arresting works exploring themes of endurance, change, transformation, regeneration and re-integration in human experience and social space. Much of her work is also shot through with a playful approach to ideas, materials, and techniques, which means her well-honed skills are worn lightly.
Laura Boswell ARE
Laura Boswell is a printmaker working in linocut, woodblock and Japanese woodblock printing. She is constantly exploring new and inventive ways of working with linocut, manipulating her cutting and printing to capture the subtleties of light and weather in her landscape prints.
With a degree in Art History and Visual art from Aberystwyth University, Laura is a printmaker specialising in rural landscape. Having trained in Japan, she now works in classical Japanese water-based woodblock and reduction linocut. Her prints are never a specific depiction of geographical reality, more an evocation of place, weather or time of day. Her ambition is to offer space, escape and a sense of scale and season through her figurative landscape prints.
She is an elected associate member of the Royal Society of Painter Printmakers (ARE).
