Tag: woodgrain

The Forest is my Temple

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This woodgrain print is the largest I have completed so far – the slice of timber is about 80cm across, so it needed lots of sanding, burning, inking and burnishing! Ella Webb, my wonderful framer, has complemented the image with a charcoal mat and Victorian mountain ash frame. This piece was chosen as the winner of the Contemporary Art Prize at the recent Hamilton Rotary Art Show, which was very exciting! The judge is the new curator at the Hamilton Gallery and I was pleased to see some other printmakers amongst the prize winners.

It has been quite a while since I posted here, but if you follow me on Instagram (@brittgow) or Facebook, you will know that I have been very involved with the start up of a new community gallery at 38 Bank Street, Port Fairy, in SW Victoria. A group known as South West Makers began advocating for a maker space, retail gallery, exhibition space, studios and workshop rooms in 2021. We found an ex-solicitors’ rooms that has huge potential to fulfill all these functions. So far we have textile artists, glass blowers, jewellers, ceramicists, printmakers, painters, eco-dyers, patchworkers and even a staff and wand maker! So, if you are in the area, be sure to come and visit.

First Solo Exhibition

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I never imagined I would be invited to exhibit my artwork in a gallery, but when MOCO gallery in Halls Gap suggested I should book an exhibition a year ahead, I thought ”Maybe I’ll be ready then”. My work with wood grain and linocut prints has developed over this time and I am pleased to be able have them on show. Hall’s Gap, in the Grampians, is the ideal location for this exhibition, as the bush environment has many examples of fallen limbs and trees, stumps and hollows in the trunks of living and dead trees. These hollows are vital habitats for many bats, birds, possums, gliders and other marsupials. Hollows take many years to form, starting when limbs fall and organisms start to break down the wood, creating a cavity in the limb or trunk. Large hollows, such as those needed by black cockatoos for nesting, can only form in trees that are over two hundred years old. Due to land clearing and habitat destruction, there are very few of these old trees left, so there is much competition for hollows.

My woodgrain prints are created by firstly selecting a suitable piece of salvaged timber, perhaps firewood or a slice cut from a fallen tree. A thin slice is then sanded flat and burnt with a blow torch to raise the wood grain. For each print, the relief ink is rolled onto the wood, damp paper is placed over the inked wood and then the back of the paper is pressed with a glass baren, to transfer the ink from the wood to the paper. For my ”One Forest” series, I use an ink pen to draw tiny little trees all around the perimeter of the wood grain print. For the ”Hollows” series, I print over the woodgrain with a linocut print.