Sarah Stewart, designer and printmaker

This blog post comes to you a day later than usual because I have been away at the very enjoyable Dumfries and Galloway ‘Spring Fling 2018’. This year 86 galleries took part, including the Craigard Gallery, Wigtown, pictured below.

The gallery is owned and run by Sarah Stewart (pictured below) and her husband. They exhibit work by local artists (for example, painter Hazel Campbell has an exhibition there later in the year, and photographic artist Laura Hudson Mackay was showing work during ‘Spring Fling’).

As a textile person myself, my eye was drawn immediately to the cushions and matching lampshade in the hallway of the gallery.

I was interested to discover that Sarah had only begun to print on fabric about 3 years ago.  Sarah trained initially in Digital Art and Design and Visual Communication and then completed a BA in Visual Communication at Edinburgh College of Art.  She has a love of retro and vintage items, like the various ones seen in the photo below, but especially manual typewriters!

Sarah was demonstrating lino-cutting at her desk when we visited.

She explained that whereas once she planned and drew out her designs, she now tends to ‘draw’ with her lino-cutter, directly into the material.

A large finished lino-cut based on a typewriter can be seen on her print press.

Sarah employs more than one method of printmaking. Another, different, typewriter-inspired print appears on a cushion.

Also on display was an intriguing automaton, in which the handle – when turned – causes  the piece to rotate producing an illusion of typed letters appearing on a page.

Without having yet exhausted the delights of vintage pieces, Sarah is now looking at natural objects (you can see items gathered from the seashore resting on the smaller print press in the first photo). Some delicate prints of feathers and stones was on display.  You can find Sarah Stewart’s Facebook page at the very end of this post.

You can see blog posts about last year’s Spring Fling here and here.

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The link to Sarah’s Facebook page is here.

This is my ‘Music’ fabric design. You can find it here.

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