A selection of Kim's prints can be found online or in store.
What brought you to Edinburgh Printmakers, and how long have you been a studio member?
Always curious about the potential for visual narratives, I trained in screen-printed textiles and surface pattern design, then worked as a freelance textile designer in London before going into arts education. I now feel that I have come full circle!
I moved up to Edinburgh in July 2022, having been a member of the wonderful Sonsoles Print Studio in Peckham, South East London. As my practice was developing alongside my art teaching, I was keen to join the Edinburgh Printmakers as a studio member.
I was hooked at the start of my induction and was happily involved in my first Members Show that December. The light-filled, open-plan space is a sheer joy to work in. Being part of a vibrant and welcoming community of fellow printmakers really cheered me up, in what was a difficult and challenging time, whilst I was settling into a new city and a new life. The peaceful, serene space always works its magic and my shoulders relax every time I go.
Why is making art important to you?
When I make, I become utterly lost in the physical process. I like to work quite quickly, making swift decisions as ideas come to mind and take shape. Even at university, when I was tutored to make lengths of screen printed fabrics, I resisted the nature of ‘repeats’ and preferred to make one-off visual statements.
Printmaking suits my instinctive approach, it becomes organic, intuitive and I love the smell of the inks and the potential mess of it all. This embodies everything I love about the process. Above all, I have a lot of fun and this is usually when the good stuff happens.
How would you describe your artistic practice?
I collect things on walks and have piles of magazines filled with leaves and stems, as well as displaced things that come my way, garlic netting or a spring of thin electric wire, that are almost waiting on the pavement as I walk home. My work is an opportunity to make a kind of documentation of place, or ways to record our environment from the small, often overlooked and fleeting elements that punctuate our daily lives. For me, the small disregarded objects can become the most curious and beautiful.
Most recently, I have incorporated sea pebbles into my work, through tracing and enlarging their shapes. I don’t have an image in my head before I start; instead the exploratory, organic, open process leaves plenty of space for curiosity and surprise. It encourages the work to play out, carry me along and take me in new directions.
Which printmaking processes do you prefer to work with, and what draws you to them as a means of expression?
Although I am always drawn to the immediacy of the screen printing process and its versatility, I also love the possibilities that come from the combination of different processes and their interplay with each other. I work across printmaking methods and I tend to push against traditions a little, resisting the nature of working in necessarily one method at a time.
I often use ‘Bette’, my beloved etching press, bought as a gift to myself from Dave Gunning in Ironbridge to celebrate the start of my practice. I use the press to form the first embossed layers before adding screen printed overlays. The processes of embossing and mono-printing change the language of the paper in a way that screen print alone doesn’t.
What’s next for your printmaking practice?
I am keen to explore the potential of using the laser-cutter to create printing plates as well as physically cutting the prints themselves. I am also inquisitive about using woodcut, after being blown away by the work of Helen Frankenthaler when I saw her exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery.
My latest work can be seen from April the 13th, at the Upright Gallery in Bruntsfield, in a joint show alongside the work of a local ceramicist, Hazel Frost.
More information about Kim and her practice can be found here:
Website: kimminuti.com
Instagram: @kimminuti
30 Mar 2024
