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Molten: prints and jewellery by Louise Rutherford

Exhibition statement:

I enjoy creating strongly textural jewellery and printmaking. My work uses a visual language of strong contrasts, complex organic forms and images of fantastic shifting undersea gardens, alien surfaces pitted with craters, hidden vaults and volcanic lava flows forming and reforming to suggest drama, emotion and movement.

My printmaking practice has developed over the years. I'm a largely self-taught printmaker, and I've incrementally developed the experimental mixture of techniques that gives my work its unique look and feel. I often incorporate natural elements like fibrous palm fronds, flax flowers or dried cabbage tree bark into my work. These elements disturb the traditional boundaries of the printed works to express the energy, drama and movement in both the external natural world, and the internal world of our emotions.

I use an experimental combination of collographic and solarplate printmaking techniques. I enjoy combining printmaking processes such as relief, intaglio and blind embossing together in the one print. I work using a organic process, where a blind embossed palm leaf may appear as a coloured element on the next print. I weave many elements together to create a cohesive bodies of work with interconnecting elements., where each process leads to the next, although it might be turned around or upside down in surprising and unexpected ways.

The printmaking works in this exhibition were printed on a Conrad Machine Co. E-15 Etching Press. I used using Fabriano Artistico 300 gsm or Magnani Incisioni 310 gsm printmaking paper, and printed my work using a combination of Charbonnel oil-based, and Akua Intaglio water based inks.

My jewellery practice has evolved out of my background as a printmaker - the deeply embossed and etched surfaces that I enjoy creating as printmaking plates suggested themselves as three dimensional works in their own right, and I began to create precious metal jewellery using a range of casting techniques. The works in this exhibition were created using the lost-wax casting process. I work using semi-precious stones such as Labrodorite, Sapphires and Rubies and working with metals such as sterling silver, copper and brass.

- Louise Rutherford, 2012