Greg Stevens
Alice Hartley
Sammi Lynch
Alice Neave
Sofia Alrich Veytia
Constanza Pulit
Lauren Bryden
Sophia McNab
Millicent Straker

‘PAINTERLY PRINT’ TALK with Ocki, Blue Shop Gallery Director 2-2.45pm at our stand.

From 26 - 29 October 2023 we’ll be joining over 500 independent artists, famous names and specialist galleries at Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair, the UK’s largest celebration of contemporary print.

Featuring 1000+ limited edition original prints, this is the ideal opportunity to discover new artists and find *that* artwork to compliment that space perfectly. Moreover, there’ll be an accompanying programme of interactive talks and workshops, covering everything from art investment to home interior design.

Alice Hartley

Alice Hartley (b.1988 in the South Downs where she grew up) graduated from Kingston University in 2010 with a BA Hons in Illustration and from the RCA in 2013 with an MA in Fine Art Printmaking, she has since been selected for New Contemporaries, had residencies in Canada, New York and Athens. Hartley lives and works in South East London and continues to exhibit around the UK, Europe and North America

Hartley set out in printmaking, making large scale woodcuts, her work referenced dreams, familiar landscapes and with fragments of her own text. Her time in the printmaking department at the RCA encouraged her to push scale as far as she could and take her mark making to a more expressive outlet in mono screen printing. The mark became more intuitive, forceful and the voice more urgent.

Over the last 10 years Hartley has used this process to make giant site-specific installations, filling gallery walls, billboards, disused car parks and shop fronts. Her palette is recognisable as is her text, from it we get a sense of something deeply personal but always ambiguous.

Sammi Lynch

Sammi Lynch was born in 1995 in the North West of England. She is a recent graduate of the Royal Drawing School whose work explores notions of place and memory and uses the natural world as a cypher for human nature and emotion. Her practice begins withdrawing from life with pastels, these drawings then serve as material for working in the studio and are developed and translated through a range of techniques including painting and printmaking. Her work expresses lived experiences of the environment through canvases that emphasise space, texture and light. The effect of these paintings is to distil momentary impressions, observed or remembered, to immerse us in the sensations of a landscape. Lynch has been awarded artist residencies in Scotland and Italy and has exhibited in group shows, including exhibitions at Christie’s, Buckingham Palace, and Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair with Blue Shop Gallery.

Greg Stevens

Greg Stevens (b.1994) is an interdisciplinary artist working in printmaking, painting and ceramics. Currently living and working in London, he graduated from the Royal Drawing School in 2022 and Kingston School of Art 2019. His work attempts to capture a detritus of memory alongside the observed as it moves anarchically between the abstract and the figurative. His works contain a kinetic sense of forms in movement, pulsating within an unstable choreography. The subject is drawn from a merging of observed imagery, extracted from drawings made plein air, and a more imagined inner psychological landscape. Printmaking provides a further way to develop surface marks and create some element of chance. Attempting to avoid and subvert sterility, the fluidity of monotype helps to pursue an instinctiveness he feels is necessary for the anxiously intense, often violently colourful pictures he creates. Greg has recently been awarded residencies in Scotland and India. He has exhibited work at Christie’s, Buckingham Palace and Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair.

Sofia Alrich Veytia

Sofia Alrich Veytia (b.1997) is a visual artist born in Mexico City, currently based in London. Her visual and theoretical research investigates the correspondences between spirituality, the natural realm, humanity, and the cosmos, focused on vibration, the spirit, and transcendence as dialogical concepts between these fields. She attempts to make substance of something that in its essence is transient, fleeting, or intangible, through amorphous figures that resemble the microcosm and macrocosm simultaneously. She is currently working mainly with intaglio printmaking, photography, and video as a means of thinking through an image in various steps, digitally manipulating the source material, dissecting it, and transforming it, wherein each mark diverges from the original source and intertwines with another.

Sofia has just finished an MA in Fine Art: Printmaking at Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London, and holds a bachelor's degree in Visual Arts from Universidad Anahuac Mexico.

She has recently been awarded the Slaughterhaus Print Award (Studio Prize) 2023, and the Volcanic Editions Editioning Prize 2023, for her work displayed at the MA Fine Art Summer Show at Camberwell College of Arts.

Constanza Pulit

Constanza Pulit (b.1994) is an Argentinian artist based in London. She graduated with an MA in Printmaking from Camberwell College of Arts in 2021. She was awarded the East London Printmaking prize in 2021. In April 2023 she did her first solo show at PM Galería, Buenos Aires.

Constanza Pulit grew up surrounded by many Latin American tales that gave her meaning and understanding of the world through a mythological and mystical perspective. She is interested in the way folkloric knowledge survives the passing generations through oral and visual storytelling. This immersion in mythology, fantasy and narrative now forms the basis for her art practice. Drawing on these surviving historical, social and cultural fables, Pulit re-enacts, re-invents and re-explores to create new contemporary narratives. When she works with photographic images, she submits them to heavy printing processes generating a new dialogue between the image and its own physicality. As an alchemist she turns her photographs into different forms until something close to the essence of a story arises.

*‘St John’s Wort’, Monotype, Lauren Bryden, 1/1 on cotton rag; 16.5cm x 13cm; 2023*

Lauren Bryden

Lauren Bryden (UK, b.1987) is a painter and printmaker working in Glasgow. After graduating from Glasgow School of Art in 2010, Lauren has subsequently worked with traditional textile dyeing techniques, metalwork, ceramics and printmaking on cloth and paper.

Bryden’s works explore the beauty and loss of growing and how the figure of the Mother shifts through time and generations. Her work invites the viewer into familiar settings and contends that even when the Mother is not present, her gaze silently defines the scene.

This series for Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair continues to draw on these themes, and looks out of the kitchen window and in to the garden for inspiration, drawing a parallel between the act of growing plants and growing children. The cyclical processes of germination, feeding, blooming and decay summon a deep compassion in the artist and offer a system to explore and understand other living worlds. The cropped framing of these images lends an intimacy to the subject, while utilising printmaking techniques which breathe life into the subject through chance textures, mark-making and depth.

*‘Touching distance 1’, Sophia McNab, Archival monoprint on somerset satin, 28 × 38 cm, 2022*

Sophia McNab

Sophia McNab is an artist and printmaker based in Hastings, East Sussex, with an MA in Fine Art from City & Guilds of London Art School (2019-21).Sophia’s work draws on her family archive to explore memory, agency and our relationship to landscape. Works are presented as a space for remembrance with the passing of time registered through disintegration and concealment. Personal histories are explored through thoughtful material exploration.After a sell out show with Blue Shop Cottage as part of Works on Paper 2022, Sophia has exhibited across the UK including with Warbling Collective and in a two person show at North Coast Asylum.

Memories move in and out of reach. Images hover between appearance and disappearance. Passing moments are caught in time.”These monoprints respond to a collection of family photographs taken on the west coast of Scotland. The ink captures the tender gesture of stroking a treasured photograph, creating a small opening through which it can be glimpsed.The works explore Roland Barthes’ concept of the punctum, set out in his seminal text Camera Lucida (1980). The punctum is the rare detail which attracts you to an image,‘that accident which pricks and bruises me’.“Through the printmaking process I am able to isolate the punctum, as I experience it, and grant it new autonomy. Clasped hands, cold feet in clear water, sunlit sand dunes. It is an act of privacy, obscuring most of the image, and of disclosure, sharing the element which I find most precious.”

*‘Lovers I’ Alice Neave 2020 Monotype on paper, 38 x 47.5cm, framed in sapele with anti-reflective glass*

Alice Neave

Alice Neave (b. 1988) was born & educated in the UK. After growing up in rural Dorset she completed a BA in Fine Art from the University of Leeds in 2010 after a Foundation diploma from the Arts Institute in Bournemouth. Alice Neave’s solo show ‘Lying Near Water’ was in October 2023 at Blue Shop Gallery. This was her 3rd Solo show but first in 5 years, her last one was in 2018 with Public Gallery in London. Having spent some time living & painting in the Poitou Charente region of France, she now works from her studio in South East London on the Thames and completed the Turps Banana correspondence course in 2021.

Millicent Straker

Millicent Straker (b. 1994) is an artist based in London whose practice focuses on drawing, painting and a verity of printmaking techniques. After finishing her Foundation at City and Guilds Millicent went straight on to complete an MA from Camberwell College of Art in Fine Art Printmaking, and was the winner of The Artichoke Print Workshop Award 2020. She has gone on to show in exhibitions such as 'Works On Paper' by Blue Shop Gallery, Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair, ‘Into the Night’ at Watts Contemporary Gallery, Collection 0.2 with FELT and ‘Pageant’ with The Violet Hour. Her work is held in private collections in the UK and internationally.

Millicent’s work is informed by colour, light and the fragility of the natural world. Moving between large abstract swathes of colour, pulled and accentuated from the environment around her, she in turn uses these to influence her more figurative work where the use of colour is always a focal point. Her signature use of blending pigments together to create gradients invites the viewer into at times a tranquil landscape and at others an ethereal stillness. The artist’s work stems from sketches, notes and photographs made within the landscape, which are then revisited later in her London studio to work from. This juxtaposition allows her to view the landscape and skies in the context of memory, fading to a raw essence of emotion, strong and strange.

Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair

Greg StevensAlice HartleySammi LynchAlice NeaveSofia Alrich VeytiaConstanza PulitLauren BrydenSophia McNabMillicent Straker

‘Lying Near Water’ by Alice Neave

‘Shaken Ground’ by Josh Raz

Greg Stevens
Alice Hartley
Sammi Lynch
Alice Neave
Sofia Alrich Veytia
Constanza Pulit
Lauren Bryden
Sophia McNab
Millicent Straker