Department Store Giclee Printmaking Product Shop Solo artist

Plug-In Pencil

posted by Robyn Pitts July 2, 2020

Adding vibrant colour and bold pattern to the post industrial landscape of Manchester, the works of Plug-In Pencil are joyful and playful abstractions of architecture. Their images focus on a building’s detail, using technical drawing styles to explore hidden surrealism.

As a trained and practising architect, Plug-In Pencil particularly love the style of Archigram; a 1970s avant-garde architecture group who adopted pop art as a tool to express their architectural visions. It is this aesthetic that initially influenced the Manchester-based artist’s work. Their prints have now also progressed into investigation of colour and postmodernism in architecture, taking further influence from the likes of the Memphis Milano group.

The exploration of the city of Manchester is also a key inspiration for their artworks; “the post industrial city scape is undergoing a significant architectural change and has always been a mix of styles, which lends itself to abstraction“. Plug-In Pencil also enjoy the work of contemporary artists who operate between the worlds of art and architecture, such as Camille Walala and Yinka Illori.

Beginning their working process by taking reference photos, they then sketch out a composition, and technically draw out their images using architecture CAD software. Now available on Department Store, Plug-In Pencil’s collection of Giclee prints not only draw inspiration from the industrial landscape of Manchester, but also illustrate a stunning mix of baroque, art nouveau, and palazzo architecture influences.

Plug-In Pencil continue to produce prints inspired by their city, geometry, and surrealism, with the aim “to begin to tie the visual aesthetic of their drawings into built works somewhere between paper art and built architecture“.