Lucy Cooper is a contemporary printmaker specialising in limited edition silkscreen prints. Strong colour palettes characterise Lucy’s work, evoking memories of much-loved places, objects, or moments of reflection. She enjoys exploring uplifting and sometimes unexpected combinations of colour and pattern to reinterpret familiar sights. The screenprinting process itself both informs and develops her work, encouraging her to strip back and simplify the subject, and to focus on the interplay of colours, shapes, and negative spaces.
Anything from a reflection in a puddle, a bottle on a table, or the glimpse of a view through a window, can influence Lucy’s creative output. “The constantly-changing patterns and colours of water always attract my attention, as do shapes and negative spaces seen both in natural forms and in man-made objects,” comments the printmaker.
Over the past few years Lucy’s work has been based around the themes of reflecting and revisiting, but recently she has been narrowing this down to focus on a couple of key areas. Currently, she is working on a body of work, Looking Out, which invites the viewer to be transported to calm, sunny places, to stimulate memories, or to inspire whatever emotions may be evoked by looking out from an imagined other place. Lucy states; “I’m also exploring still life in a simplified, abstracted way – inspired by contemporary ceramics and their shapes and forms.”
“I’ve always been fascinated by printmaking, from playing with potato prints and linocuts as a child, through to designing and printing posters and cards at university and beyond, and then taking a Print & Publishing Diploma which led me to work on the print and production side of book publishing,” states the printmaker. Lucy’s academic background is as a historian, which has invariably informed areas of visual interest as well, while her career has been largely in publishing, most recently commissioning educational resources. However, alongside her other pursuits, creating art has been a constant in her life.
Lucy was first introduced to the joys of screenprinting at Glasgow Print Studio and Glasgow School of Art many years ago. She then continued her printmaking practice in London from 2014. Today, she lives in Brighton and prints from Inkspot Press studio in Hove.
Lucy concludes; “I feel as if I’m at an exciting stage of my printmaking development. I’m definitely not short of inspiration – particularly having just returned from a fortnight in India – and have plenty of ideas or works-in-progress ongoing at various stages of the process, but my challenge at the moment is to focus my direction and continue to develop my style – both building on what I’ve already created but also experimenting with other ideas and processes.” Recently, she has been making larger pieces, while also looking into more abstraction and exploring the parameters offered by the screenprinting process.
www.lucycooperprints.com
@lucycooper_prints
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