September 14, 2023

Lucy May Schofield demonstrated some of her printmaking methods and talked about the inspiration behind her work.

Lucy demonstrated the mokuhanga printing technique she uses to create her beautiful water-based woodcuts. She applies pigments to carved wood blocks with brushes and uses pressure from a handheld baren to draw the colour through the mulberry paper, meaning the entire process is created by hand.

Mokuhanga appears deceptively simple, yet the balanced nuance of water, ink, nori paste, printing pressure and carving depth requires a combination of practice and sensitivity. Lucy makes small editions of prints using the traditional techniques and knowledge she has learnt from master crafts people in Japan.

During the event Lucy launched a new limited edition mokuhanga print called 'September Song'.

September Song is inspired by the change of the season from summer to autumn with each pigment used in the print relating to one of the seven inner planets.

Lucy May Schofield

After graduating from London College of Printing in 2002, Lucy was awarded a two-year funded residency at Manchester School of Art, where she also worked as an Associate Lecturer until 2010. In 2011 Lucy relocated to Japan, where her interest in printmaking developed. As joint recipient of a British Council International development award in 2015, Lucy initiated a collaborative project at IMPACT 9 Printmaking Conference in China. The project travelled to Southern Graphics Conference International (SGCI) in Portland, USA in 2016. Later that year Lucy was awarded a one-year residency with VARC (Visual Artists in Rural Communities), in a remote part of Northumberland where she is still currently based. Lucy leads printmaking and book arts workshops around the UK.

Residencies at Scotland’s Hospitalfield, California’s Kala Art Institute, NES in Iceland and VARC in Northumberland have informed an exploration into durational work in combination with printmaking. Lucy has attended three artist's residencies in Japan, at the Mokuhanga Innovation Laboratory where she has studied Japanese woodblock printmaking since 2015. Her works are held in public and private collections including Tate Britain, Yale Centre for British Art, Stanford University, Chelsea College of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University, State Library of Queensland and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Recent works have been presented at Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair, The Royal Academy Summer Show, Art Toronto, The London Art Fair and The International Mokuhanga Conference in Hawaii, where Lucy was joint-recipient of the Awagami Paper Prize. In 2020 Lucy was the winner of the Flourish Award for excellence in Printmaking from West Yorkshire Print Workshop, awarded a solo exhibition at Huddersfield Art Gallery in 2021.