Over the Summer of 2023 I worked on a series of large format copper original works which was a fairly ambitious undertaking as I had never done it before. I had decided in the Spring to take a stand at the London Design Fair as an exercise in 'getting it out there’ and during July, August and early September I worked hard on these.

The project started with some large pieces of copper plate that I acquired. It was filthy dirty, patinated and covered in glue - so that meant having to clean it off first.

Light Lines Series

Deciding what to do with the copper to present a collection I decided to narrow my focus to the Lines of Light mentioned in the previous post and to restrict the language to equally sized hexagons with different line weights. This gave me the limitation to work more geometrically (maths is not my strong point however) and to keep the focus on the composition and etching.

Within the etched lines are photographic textures of old walls, scratched metal and other abstract textures. These are then exposed on to the copper using a photo sensitive emulsion applied to the metal and the textures printed on to acetates and then the two placed together in an exposure unit. Colin at Artichoke print helped me manage the project as these plates were huge.

The results are varied. I’m generally happy with them but the process taught me a lot and I do plan on going back to these and adapting them slightly. So it’s still a work in progress !

Take a look below at some of the images from the process.