Printmaker, book artist and paper conservator Hannah Fray develops sculptural concertina books during her residency at the Regional Print Centre Wrexham, merging etching, screenprint, spray paint and drawing into hybrid cityscapes that debut at Bristol Artists’ Book Event in June 2026.
The cities Hannah Fray builds in her books do not quite exist. They are drawn from visits to real locations, from memory and from imagination, assembled into hybrid landscapes that have the structural logic of Escher and the slightly vertiginous quality of a Christopher Nolan cityscape that folds back on itself.
“I am interested in the intersection of memory and structure,” Fray says, “and how the spaces we inhabit shift between what we see and what we remember seeing.”
Facets of a City is a new series of sculptural concertina books in development at the Regional Print Centre in Wrexham, where Fray is currently in residence producing the printed elements. The books are designed to expand into immersive forms or fold away into intimate objects, a juxtaposition of scale and presence that defines the whole project. Open them out and the imagined urban landscapes unfold across etched, screenprinted, spray-painted and drawn surfaces; fold them closed and they become compact, holdable things that contain everything they just showed you.
The work explores the intersection of architecture, biodiversity and what Fray calls the hybrid spaces of urban landscapes, the places where the built environment and natural systems overlap and create something neither fully one nor the other. Drawing on M.C. Escher’s impossible geometries alongside the surreal cinematic environments of Gondry and Nolan, the visual language she has developed is precise and dreamlike at once, grounded in real structures and lifted into something stranger.
“The printed book form allows me to hold multiple cityscapes in a single object,” she says, “folding together the real and the imagined into something you can carry.”
Hannah Fray is a printmaker, book artist and paper conservator based in North West England. She has managed the Bluecoat Print Studio in Liverpool and taught at several UK universities. Shortlisted for the 2026 John Ruskin Prize and the 2026 Jacksons Art Prize, her work has been featured in Pressing Matters and Printmaking Today and exhibited internationally through IMPACT and the International Screenprint Biennial.
ARTIST LINKS
hannahfray.com
@hannahfray
Facets of a City, 2026. Sculptural concertina artist books. Mixed media: etching, screenprint, spray paint, drawing, painting. Developed at the Regional Print Centre, Wrexham. Debuting at Bristol Artists’ Book Event (BABE), UWE, 26–27 June 2026.
