Anja Percival & Joanna Bourne: This Common Place

Anja Percival & Joanna Bourne: This Common Place

3rd September – 30th September

You are invited to join us at the Preview on Friday 2nd of September 5pm till 7pm.

This Common Place brings together work by Anja Percival and Joanna Bourne, printmakers who both draw inspiration from their immediate and everyday surroundings. This exhibition explores the different atmospheres that light creates in our environments – translating the seemingly mundane into something unmistakably beautiful. With brand new etchings and woodcut prints, This Common Place is a display of both technical skill and conceptual beauty. This exhibition will feature framed prints by both artists, together with unframed work, available for purchase.

About Anja Percival

Anja Percival is a printmaker, who is fascinated by the different atmospheres that light creates in our environment.

She specialises in copperplate etching, using wax resist on aquatint. Her etchings are all hand-drawn, and do not use any photographic or digital techniques. The etchings are created by working directly onto the copper plate with a wax pencil. Percival rarely starts with line, but instead focuses on the highlights within an image, using techniques that build on the areas that will remain light, instead of building up the image with dark line and shading. Then during the printing process, she applies ink to the plate in quite a painterly fashion – ‘à la poupée’ – that allows her to vary density and colour in such a way as to exaggerate the effect of the etched image. This ink is then later transferred to paper by extreme pressure in an etching press.

anjapercival.co.uk @anjapercival

About Joanna Bourne

Joanna Bourne is a printmaker living in Newcastle upon Tyne. Almost all of her printmaking is relief printing, principally woodcuts.

She chooses the wood according to the grain, as the wood grain forms an important part of the design of her images, adding texture.  Each new print is approached in a way that suits the image so she doesn’t have a ‘usual’ way of working on a print. She plans the layers in advance, some blocks inked up in more than one colour, with overprinting in transparent colours, blocks jigsawed together and use of reduction printing.

joannabourne.co.uk @jobourneprint

About the Curator

Jed Buttress is an award-winning artist and curator based in Newcastle upon Tyne. He has curated over one hundred exhibitions, independently and with organisations such as NOPHOTO, The Royal Photographic Society and the Wellcome Trust Centre for Mitochondrial Research, and has curated artworks by artists such as Antony Gormley and Lubaina Himid. 

He has recently been appointed as Curator and Programme Co-ordinator at the Newcastle Arts Centre, and has been responsible for the installation of recent shows such as the Documentary Photographer of the Year 2021: Touring Exhibition (May 2022) and Liz Atkin: Drawings, Collage and Writing – A Retrospective (June 2022).@jedbuttress jedbuttress.com

Anja Percival & Joanna Bourne: This Common Place
3rd September – 30th September
Preview: Friday 2nd September 5pm-7pm

Newcastle Arts Centre
67 Westgate Road, NE1 1SG
0191 261 5618
admin@newcastle-arts-centre.co.uk