ELIZABETH MYERS

In April I took a photograph of the shadows of  a water jug and a vase of forget me nots that happened to be next to it. The collision of refractions and elongated shadows created unexpected, beautiful patterns and relationships.I used the reduction method as it is both economical with wood and slows down the process, causing you to consider how colours and shapes collide and overlap. As the image emerged from the board, I started to see the jug shadow as a woman in a decorated dress with her shadow offspring in tow.  I used some homemade dyes made from boiling green tea, black willow bark and quince leaves. These homemade dyes were so pale that they hardly registered when used on their own, but made a subtle difference when mixed with standard water colour paints. I also used a variety of papers: Shoji, Kitakata, Shiramine, Iwami and Kozuke which all gave very different results.

I had an incredible abundance of sweet peas this summer which I had grown from seed in my garden and on my allotment. I was picking huge bunches every morning and spent a lot of time looking at them. I started by doing a painting directly onto the board to try and fix the effect of the light on the jar and the shadow and then began cutting the parts I wanted to keep white. I had just one board so it seemed sensible to do a reduction cut. I did a tracing of the painted board which became my reference for all subsequent layers of cutting and printing.  Apart from the tracing of my original painting I had no fixed idea of how the print would develop and changed my ideas in response to each printed layer and tried different coloured backgrounds using the Bokashi method.