Meet Kevin!
Kevin has been a member at EP for 2 years now. They specialise in relief printing and lithography. As seen in the piece they submitted for the EP Our Shared World exhibit, "Kevin, New York, migrant," they use their work to explore personal experiences with migration as well as themes surrounding identity, connections, and divisions that come with the human experience.
How would you describe your printmaking practice?
My artistic practice is rooted in my love of drawing. As a child, if I wasn’t outside playing in the mud, I was always drawing on any scrap piece of paper I could find, and processing my inner thoughts and emotions through the physical act of drawing is still central to how I work as a printmaker today. Thematically, my art explores our shared communal stories, our hidden inner narratives, and the identities, connections and divisions we construct in response to the people and world around us. I am especially drawn to the spaces we inhabit between multiple lived realities, and how we resolve dual identities to present a curated version of ourselves. I find myself returning again and again to the dual and multiple identities I see within myself; from my childhood growing up between Germany and England, through the fluid nature of the gender-queer/nonbinary experience, to the constantly conflicted desires and needs of my autistic/ADHD brain.
What drew you into printmaking? Is there a reason you chose this art form as a way to tell your story?
As soon as I set foot into my first open access print studio (Ochre Print Studio in Guildford), I knew I had found my home. I got sucked in by the smell of the inks permeating the studio and the physicality and communal nature of the printmaking process. Because I’m drawn to dual states of existence and transformations, I am enthralled by the magical transformation that the image undergoes from the physical three-dimensional image I work into wood, metal or stone, and how this is translated into a visual two-dimensional artwork on paper through the printing process. I am transfixed by the way that this moment of transformation from the tactile to the visual is always just beyond my reach as the artist creator. I can neither see nor feel that moment, and I find in this a beautiful symmetry with the ways in which our lives and experiences transform us in ways that are often outside our control.
What do you enjoy about relief printing and lithography in particular?
The German side of my family has a strong tradition of working as carpenters, miners and farmers, which helps explain my connection to nature and working with wood, stone and other natural materials. There’s nothing I enjoy more than the physicality of carving a woodblock; the smells and textures immediately take me back to my grandfather’s wood workshop and the toys, furniture and even houses he built for the family.
The limestones I get to know intimately when I work in stone lithography, with all their hidden little veins and fossils, are also magical to me. Lithography allows me to express my love of drawing more immediately, and I also find that working with these inanimate stones that once wriggled their way around shallow seas in the shells of tiny sea creatures helps me explore my interest in transformations and our changing states of being. I try and retain the organic scars and imperfections of the limestones and woodblocks I work with in my final artworks, mirroring our own perceived imperfections that we try to hide as we curate the idealised versions of ourselves that we present to the world.
Do you see yourself experimenting with other techniques?
I’ve given most major printmaking techniques a go, but so far only etching has managed to grab my attention enough to tempt me to make the space and time to experiment with it further. It has that same magical combination of drawing and the connection to natural materials that I love, so I’m keen to see what playing with copper plates can bring to my practice.
What first brought you to Edinburgh Printmakers?
I thrive in communal print studios. I really relish the social interactions and feedback from other artists, and am a bit loath to admit that I also need the commitment to a prebooked studio session to hold myself to account and get any creative work actually done. When I moved to Edinburgh for my partner’s job just as the world was opening up after the pandemic, I was keen to connect with my local print studio. I was especially excited to have the opportunity to explore stone lithography since I had already been working in mokulito (a wood-based lithographic process). Although I had already booked myself on to Alastair’s stone lithography course, I couldn’t wait to get printing and so my first experiences of Edinburgh Printmakers were through Fiona and Namhara’s Drink and Print sessions, which were a wonderful way to playfully experiment with a variety of new printmaking techniques.
What drew you to submit the piece that you did for the Our Shared World exhibit?
Kevin, New York, migrant is a print I worked on last year and I felt it was a perfect fit for this year’s Members’ Show theme. I’ve spent a lot of my life moving around, and the print reflects on my personal experience of moving to the US for work for five years (and back again). Migration is fundamental to the human experience, and ultimately it’s through the act of voluntary or involuntary migration that we are confronted with the realities of the people we share our world with. I was particularly interested in exploring how being a migrant can change the way we see ourselves, and how others see us as an immigrant or a returning expat. The print is part of an ongoing series of lithographs called Our Story, and like other works in the series I was getting to grips with the degree to which our experiences and identities are shaped by the expectations of others versus our own lived truths. In an increasingly divisive world, this series aims to reveal our fundamental shared humanity by creating a compendium of shared human narratives across geography, time, and disparate personal identities and lived experiences that reveal the hidden experiences that unite us.
Why do you think art is important in today's world?
Art is everything. It’s what makes us human. Now more than ever we need art to help us reflect on, explore and express deep and difficult thoughts intuitively to bring out new truths and new world visions that our analytical brains cannot access. We each need our personal creative space to bring calmness and respite from the constant bombardment of the digital world. More than anything we need to harness the communal nature of printmaking to connect with the people around us and forge strong communities that can help foster dialogue, understanding and belonging across divides in an increasingly polarised world.
How do you begin a project/series?
The series I work on generally come about after I’ve spent quite some time (sometimes years) ruminating on a particular theme or idea, often influenced by podcasts, books or media discourse. I’m always looking for novel or unheard perspectives that I feel are missing from the conversation. Most of the compositions themselves come to me fully formed in a flash of inspiration that I have to scribble down on the closest piece of scrap paper, and as the mountain of ideas piles up, something will grab my attention and get me started on a new print. I then usually create individual artworks by referring back to my life drawing sketchbooks or staged reference photographs I prepare with my husband (often repurposing photographs intended for an entirely different project). Although I do spend some time working on an overal design or concept for my prints, I tend to create the actual image intuitively directly on the woodblock or litho stone working layer by layer. I almost never know exactly where each layer will take me or what colours will end up in the final print, and for me the joy is in the fact that the final artwork is as much a surprise to myself as to everyone else.
What do you see for the future of your art?
I haven’t worked on a woodcut print for a while so I’ve been feeling an urgent need to carve recently. I’m mulling over some ideas around queer histories and how they relate to today’s narratives around neurodivergence and disability and I’m keen to explore these in my home studio (where I handprint my woodcut prints) while I continue to work on the next prints in my series of lithographs in my Our Story series at Edinburgh Printmakers. I’m also excited to have recently been accepted on to my first residency, Edition Basel at the Druckwerk in Basel, Switzerland, and I’m very much looking forward to working as a group under a theme of our own choosing to explore new ideas and techniques away from my usual practice.
Is there anything else you would like to share?
I’ll soon be exhibiting one of my copperplate etchings alongside a diverse range of creative works from visual to performance art and literature from fellow members of Neuk Collective, a Scotland-based collective for neurodivergent artists that I’m part of. The show is called Together | Apart and will be showing from the 18th of April until the 23rd of May at Project Ability Gallery, Trongate 103, Glasgow. Please sign the petition to save this creative space, which is also home to Glasglow Print Studio.
People can also explore more about my work on my website (www.caddisprints.com), and I’d also love to connect with people on Instagram (@Caddis.Prints) or next time we see each other in the studio.
