We recently took Dunlin Press to The Minories in Colchester for a pop-up, bringing our books, prints and other work into the gallery space. It also gave me the opportunity to show something I have been wanting to show for quite a while: my Stations lino prints.
I was delighted to finally do it.
Dunlin Press is an independent publisher and artist-led art project based in Wivenhoe, Essex, which Martin Bewick (MW Bewick) and I founded in 2015. Over the past decade, we have built a distinctive catalogue spanning poetry, prose, visual art and experimental writing, working with both emerging and established artists to create books, limited-edition pamphlets, prints and soundtracks.
It was lovely to bring that work into The Minories and, for me, particularly satisfying to see Stations lino cut prints occupying a gallery space.
Stations
Stations is a series of 16 hand-cut lino prints that sit somewhere between language and silence.
They take the Stations of the Cross as their starting point, but these are secular works. Rather than following a religious narrative, they turn towards the universal stations of human experience: vulnerability, suffering, endurance, compassion and those moments when the weight we carry becomes too much to bear alone.
The prints draw on asemic poetry and abstract mark-making. The marks look as though they should be read but they resist being read in any single or fixed way. They are gestures, fragments and traces. They remind me of memories that remain with us without ever becoming fully explainable.
The physical act of making them is important too. I hand-cut each lino strip. The incisions recall ancient tablets and marks carved into stone: records left behind, even when we no longer have the complete story of what they mean. There is something about the repetition of cutting into the lino that makes the process feel connected to the subject matter. The resulting prints hold traces of pain and uncertainty alongside endurance and strength, but nothing is resolved into a simple narrative.
Terrains of Love and Grief
Alongside Stations, we showed Terrains of Love and Grief, works made with ink and acrylic on builder’s paper.
The tough, robust industrial paper has been transformed through momigami, the Japanese practice of kneading and working paper to soften and alter its fibres.
For these pieces, I wanted the making to be physical. The large sheets were wrestled with, pierced and marked using my father’s carpenter’s chisels. There is something about using those tools that connects the work to memory, inheritance and making, the marks becoming both physical and emotional traces.
The works evoke the landscape around Wivenhoe ferry marsh: reeds, mud, grasses, birdsong, changing light and the movement of the seasons. The marsh became a place of refuge and restoration for me. Its cycles of growth, decay and renewal offered another way of thinking about loss and healing. Rather than seeing them as separate states, the landscape suggests that they are part of the same continuum.
These are remembered landscapes. Places where personal grief and reflection meet the larger rhythms of the natural world.
Stations, performed
And then there was the performance. If you missed us, you missed a vibe.
We performed Stations at The Minories, with Jo Morrison (pictured above) on voice, me doing live mark-making, and Martin layering guitar across his Stations soundtrack.
It was a joy.
The performance is built around the same themes as the prints: grief, loss, endurance, compassion, transformation, love and the thresholds of life and death.
Martin’s instrumental album was written and recorded specifically for the Stations project and provides the sonic foundation for the live performance. The album is available through the Dunlin Press Bandcamp page.
For the live version, the music, voice and mark-making unfold together in real time. Jo’s vocalisation and song are improvised. Martin’s atmospheric sound develops around the performance. And I make asemic marks live. So although we have the structure of the Stations of the Cross as a starting point, the performance itself is never completely fixed.
The performance also made me realise again how much I enjoy collaboration. The Stations prints begin as a very solitary process, sitting with the lino, making one cut at a time.
The performance completely changes that. Martin and Jo bring their own interpretations of the themes of grief, loss and redemption. Martin does it through wonderfully atmospheric music. Jo does it through exquisitely powerful vocalisation. What a joy it is to work with these humans.
So while this is performance was a one-off, we’re hoping it’s not a one off performance and we can resurrect it somewhere, sometime, hopefully soon.
Thank you to everyone who came along, to The Minories for providing such an excellent setting, and to Jo and Martin for making the performance such a special experience.
