As the weather begins to improve, my thoughts turn back to the garden workshop. It’s a rough and ready space — too cold and damp over winter to bring me any joy, but once the sun is out! It’s where I design, cut and print my relief prints. Winter tends to interrupt that rhythm. Tools sit unused, blocks remain unfinished, and ideas stay in notebooks. Spring changes that.
A small but significant step this week was replacing my old barren. The previous one had fallen apart twice. It had done its duty, but it was never quite robust enough for the work I want to do. So I finally replaced it with a Slama Press barren from Handprinted, which arrived only two days after ordering.
I was persuaded partly by watching a video demonstration of how it works. The design is simple but clever: a steel ball running within a wooden frame that distributes pressure evenly across the back of the paper. Instead of dragging or rubbing in the traditional way, the ball rolls, allowing controlled pressure while keeping the hand relaxed. The system also makes sense in a broader way — the larger and heavier barrens from the same maker form a kind of modular set for progressively larger prints. It feels like buying into a tool designed by someone who understands printmaking. I enjoy the physicality of the process: like beating eggs.
Relief printing, for me, has always been about a feeding curiosity and challenging my skill designing the image, transferring it to the block, cutting it carefully, testing proofs, adjusting pressure and ink. It all takes time, usually over sevwral days and that’s part of the attraction.
My own route into relief printing came through a mixture of drawing, observation and time spent walking in woodland. Much of my drawing and photography has focused on trees — particularly veteran trees — over the past couple of years I’ve spent a great deal of time recording and surveying them. The Ancient Tree Inventory, walks around Markstakes Common, and a growing archive of drawings have slowly fed into the idea that these landscapes deserve a visual record in print. In Lewes, as well as surveying the old trees, I’ve collected images of the castle, the oubs and iconic buildings all with a mind producing more prints.
This spring I want to return to that work properly.
One print already planned is The Pomegranate Tree, Lewes, a curiosity that enthrals when it comes into flower. Another is The Barbican, Lewes.
Alongside these I want to continue developing prints based on the companion trees of Markstakes Common — trees that have grown together for centuries, shaping each other’s form and survival.
And then there is a larger idea that has been sitting quietly in the background: a Hadrian’s Wall Triptych. The wall has always fascinated me. It is both a physical structure and a conceptual boundary — landscape, history and human ambition all compressed into a single line across northern Britain. A triptych feels like the right format for exploring it.
None of this work happens quickly. Relief printing demands time — time to draw, time to cut, time to test, and time to print again.
But that’s precisely the point.
The arrival of a new barren is a small thing in itself, but it marks the beginning of a return to the workshop, to the blocks, and to the slow rhythm of making prints by hand.
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