A selection of prints by Lindy Furby are available in the shop.
I joined Edinburgh Printmakers in June 2009 on an etching course by Alphons Bytautas. I had learnt printing many years before at Teacher Training College but life – climbing, work and family got in the way of further development. I have been a member for 13 years and have spent more and more of my time engaged in printmaking.
2010 was an iconic year in my artistic development. I went on a course with Peter Wray on carborandum and collagraph printing and I took my first campervan based sketching trip around the Scottish highlands. I developed an objective of making collagraph images of the whole of Scotland.
I have been a lifelong lover of the outdoor landscape. I have climbed, walked, camped, skied up and down, kayaked and swam, engaging with and enjoying the landscape in physically active ways.
My artwork is just a continuation of this, it is a part of my life. I engage with the landscape this time by sitting still, looking, contemplating and finally mark-making- usually watercolour sketches. This behaviour burns the landscape into my brain in a way that taking a photograph cannot.
My favourite print making process is collagraphs. I started making collagraphs because I could make the plates at home thus maximising my time at the workshop for actually printing. – and I grew to love it. It is very playful and experimental – it involves sticking all sorts of objects such as wallpaper, moss, string, tiling cement on a matrix (in my case usually card) and cutting/tearing into the matrix to create all sorts of textures that hold ink differently. This plate is then inked up like an etching plate and wiped clean. Damp paper is lain on it and it is put through an etching press – the paper picks up the ink from the textures.
When I return home from my travels I revisit my sketches and transfer the images to collagraph plates and print the landscapes I have experienced. In a very real way I revisit the landscape and remember it; my artwork attaches me to the landscapes like an invisible umbilical cord.
I also engage in protest art. My work was selected for The Mouth of the Shark exhibition In Cork Ireland – a response to Warsan Shire’s poem “Home” -eventually shown in July 2021. It was an installation comprising of a washing line hung with silken images of clothing printed with images of migration. Nothing is more homely than a clothesline – but the images are devastating – coffin lorries to dead babies. This installation was also hung in a backyard at Saltaire Arts Trail this year. Around a thousand people viewed the installation and many were profoundly moved.
Another protest installation was Discarded. At the start of the coronavirus crisis in the UK I became aware very quickly that BAME people in the NHS had unfeasibly high fatality rates I subsequently discovered this was true for other frontline workers e.g. bus drivers, care assistants etc. Discarded consists of 50 prints of facemasks with images of named Black, Asian and minority ethnic individuals who died as a result of contacting covid whilst working - it was shown scattered on the floor of the Lady Chapel St John’s Waterloo London – as if they had been discarded.
