Rachel Salisbury - printmaker
Living and working at the foot of the beautiful Malvern Hills, I am an artist printmaker working primarily with relief techniques through reduction, single and multi block Lino prints.
Nature fascinates me and transforming all of the complexities of natural subjects like plants or animals into a bold image for printing, forms the basis of my work.
My Work Process
Starting with pencil sketches, I find my way through in a kind of back to front way, in that I start with a lot of detail trying to get to know and understand the subject and how it all fits together and then I start searching out the bold shapes and the repeating patterns. Sometimes the result is a single layer image carved and printed from just one Lino block and at other times it is multilayered, using different colours that will either be layered from a single reducing block or set out across a number of different plates each with its’ own colour.
For each print that is produced and for each colour that is used, the carved Lino blocks are separately inked using artist quality oil based ink, passed through my etching press and then hung to dry. The whole process from starting a design through to a finished print can take many weeks or months depending on the number of layers in the image.