Anna Wilkinson details a typically hectic and varied week at Northern Print in Newcastle’s fast-developing Ouseburn Valley.
AS director of Northern Print, my role involves day to day management, strategic development and creative programming.
I initially trained and worked as an artist, and I have been running Northern Print for the past nine years – during which time it has undergone a major period of development and growth culminating in a relocation to purpose-designed premises in Ouseburn. I divide my time between day to day tasks and future planning and fundraising, while also having a real commitment to printmaking and the need to promote it as a way of working for all artists, and raising the profile of artists who work in this rich and varied medium.
MONDAY is usually a day for spending with my sons. However, today I had a couple of things to do for Northern Print too. We’re taking part in the Newcastle Gateshead Art Fair in September.
This year it is taking place in the Sage so I went along with colleagues Rebecca and Helen to have a look at the space we’ve been given – it should be a stunning venue for the event. We’re going to be doing printmaking demonstrations as well as letting people have a go at printing badges for themselves so we wanted to get a good sense of what was possible with the space and think through how best to make it work.
We also wanted to have a final chat about which artists work we’d like to show. We wanted to make sure we managed to include a real diversity of work so that there really was something for everyone’s taste and budget.
Northern Print’s current exhibition has work by three young Japanese printmakers and we were hosting one of them, Chizuru Kondo to do a demonstration of how her prints are made using a traditional Japanese woodblock process.
We’ve hosted a number of Japanese printmakers over the past 10 years and they all have an incredible technical mastery which is always spellbinding to watch. Chizuru carves her images into pieces of plywood and then uses rich colours as well as gold leaf to transfer her ideas onto papers. Somehow the lack of a common language adds to the experience.
Tuesday
I SPENT Tuesday morning catching up with messages and tasks. Northern Print is a company limited by guarantee which means we are not-for-profit and have a voluntary board of directors.
Part of my job is to service the board and there are a number of things I needed to do following on from the last meeting. Everyone’s been on a high since we moved into our new building in Ouseburn nearly two years ago, but it is time to build on that success and think about how to move onto the next stage of development.
One of the things we are developing is the service we can offer to business to encourage them to choose original prints for their workplaces. As part of this we are about to launch a new brochure outlining the value of artworks in offices, boardrooms and hotels and I had a meeting with our invaluable copywriter to go through the final copy for this.
I spent the rest of the day working on an international project we have been developing for a number of years that I feel very committed to.
It is a major event for printmaking the like of which hasn’t been seen in the UK for many, many years. I always feel that printmaking is so often misunderstood or overlooked, which seems so wrong when you consider that almost every artist you can think of, either living or dead, makes prints at some point in their career.
If all goes to plan the event will take place in summer 2009 and so I have been contacting the great and good of printmaking in the UK to invite them to Newcastle to take part in the final planning stages. What’s especially pleasing is that everyone seems up for it – no one turned down the invitation. It’s great to have that kind of response, it shows you can make things happen in the North East of an international scale.
Wednesday
I HAD a meeting this morning with one of our board members about putting together our first newsletter for studio members.
It’s something we’ve talked about doing for ages, so it feels good that it’s finally arrived at the top of the ‘to do’ list. Northern Print’s printmaking studio is used by more than 150 artists who sign up for an annual membership allowing them to access the facilities.
Northern Print’s members are an amazingly diverse group of people doing all sorts of things and so we asked a few to write articles for the first issue. We hope that it’ll become a quarterly publication and a good way of studio users communicating with each other about what they’re doing or looking to do.
Then spent a lot of the day dealing with a range of day to day tasks - everything from going through the insurance schedule to talking to Commissions North about the possibility of print being incorporated into a new development in Ouseburn. I had a late meeting with aboard member who is visiting Singapore next week and is going to meet the Tyler Print Institute out there with a view to making links between the two organisations. So we talked about what possible collaborations might be worthwhile discussing. It would be great to be able to establish links between the two education programmes.
I then worked late to finish off lots more tasks before heading home.
Thursday
TODAY we had a visit from the director of the Centre for Fine Print Research at the University of West England in Bristol.
Our next exhibition is digital prints from there and so he came up to go through the arrangements. We are really pleased to present this show, as they are doing some really exciting things by enabling artists to exploit the latest technologies in digital print. It’s going to include a work by artist Richard Hamilton as well as lots of prints people can buy for £25. So, hopefully even in with the current economic jitters there’s still something of real quality and originality that people can afford to fall in love with.
Friday
IT is the summer holidays and so I spend today with the boys – a bit of a busman’s holiday back in time as we visited Cherryburn. It’s the birthplace of Newcastle’s most famous printmaker, Thomas Bewick.
Anna Wilkinson is director of Northern Print, centre for contemporary printmaking, on Stepney Lane in Newcastle’s thriving Ouseburn area. For further information go to www.northernprint.org.uk or call (0191) 261-7000.
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