Bristol Print Collective
Plymouth Print in Action
At the start of 2022 Real Ideas organisation invited us to contribute to Plymouth’s first Print Festival - Print In Action which took place over a weekend in October. We were more than happy to participate and wanted to create something really unique to the festival celebrating all things print and community.
We arranged to meet with marine biologists and took a field trip to the Marine Park in Plymouth to inspire our first collaborative print as a collective. We discovered there are around 10,000 types of seaweed which blew our minds and sparked our collective interests in the wonders of the sea. We wanted to create a print that celebrated the beauty of the natural world but also included hints of pollution that covers our coast lines.
Back in Bristol we worked on combining our sketches, mixing our drawing styles and overlapping natural seaweed shapes with plastic objects, all intertwined and ever growing like the ocean waters, working on a huge 2m circular lino.
We brought the giant lino and several carving tools to Print In Action festival at Ocean Studios in Plymouth and set up a drop in workshop to invite all festival participants to carve with us. This was a huge collaborative effort with over 200 hands helping us bring the design to life carving out little or large sections over the course of the weekend collaboratively.
In the afternoon on the last day of the festival we moved onto the stage and began inking up large rollers to prepare for the big print! We involved even more participants to help ink and watch with anticipation as we used our incredibly heavy, water filled garden roller to roll across the paper pressing onto the lino. We wanted to ensure every detail of the print came out so it was a final collaborative effort to burnish the paper with several wooden spoons and all ages got involved.
We had the best time working as a collective this way and involving so many members of the public to help our print come to life. To honour the efforts made by so many we are auctioning the prints in February with 10% of proceeds being donated to a marine charity and additional funds will go towards further collaborative projects for our collective.
The prints will be limited to an edition of 10 and will be available to bid online soon. Further details on how to auction will be announced by the end of January.