Corbie, bran, cigfran…AKA the Raven!

Posted on October 28, 2025 by hestercoxprintmaker

Ravens have captivated me for most of my life and I am fortunate to live in an area where I see them often. When I summit Ingleborough there will invariably be a pair flying around and I see them when I am running over Plover Hill and Pen-y-ghent. These intelligent members of the corvid (crow) family are also the largest and the ones that feature most in the folklore and mythology of cultures from all over the world. (Below are just a few photos I’ve taken over the years, note the difference in size between the raven and the crow in the last photo!).

For Charms and Murmurings at Ryedale Folk Museum – my latest Collections exhibition with Josie Beszant & Charlotte Morrison – we are showing work inspired by the folklore, mythology and stories surrounding birds. Ravens feature in many of our pieces including our collaborative work ‘Corvid’. I made a template showing the primary and secondary wing feathers of a raven and we each made fourteen feathers that, when collected together, formed a pair of ‘wings’. I love the distinctive primaries on a raven’s wing that look like fingers stroking the sky.

The three of us at the opening of Charms and Murmurings
(l-r: Charlotte, Josie, me)

My collagraph feathers are inspired by the many places throughout Yorkshire that are named after ravens and also the Norse myth of Odin and his two ravens, Huginn & Muninn (Charlotte’s feathers are ceramic and Josie’s are paper collages).

Ravens are carrion eaters and, because of this, they were often associated with death and loss. They are also ‘talking birds’ that are able to mimic human speech and this is thought to be the reason that they appear as messengers in so many myths, often travelling between worlds, to bring news to their human companions. Back in 2000, I created a raven collagraph inspired by Celtic mythology and called The Messenger:

25 years later(!) I have chosen to explore the story of Odin’s ravens and for Charms and Murmurings I have created this piece entitled Thought and Memory:

Huginn (Thought) and Muninn (Mind or Memory) would sit beside Odin – often regarded as the God of Ravens, the dead and warfare – and each morning he sent them out across the world and they would report back on everything they saw and heard. The names of the ravens are difficult to translate but Huginn is thought to represent the intellect/comprehension/perception and Muninn the emotions/memory/urges (to put it very simply). Whilst researching ravens, I came across an article that referenced a quote from the Poetic Edda called Grímnismál (in old Icelandic):

Huginn ok Muninn fljúga hverjan dag Jormungrund yfir;

óumk ek of Hugin, at hann aptr né komit, pó sjámk meirr um Munin.

A translation of this is:

Thought and Memory fly every day the whole world over;

each day I fear that Thought may not return, yet I fear more for Memory.

This really resonated with me and, coming at the idea from an ecological viewpoint, I wanted to depict Thought (Huginn) as living in the natural world that we see and experience physically and I have used the branches of an ash tree which directly links to the sacred ash tree (Yggdrasil) in Norse myth. I’ve created moths to fly among the branches symbolising thoughts and the spirit.

For Memory (Muninn), I depicted the roots of an ash tree with fossils caught amongst them representing the past, our memories and the underworld realm of the dead. The fact that Odin was an elderly man and that he feared losing Muninn more than Huginn made me think about the devastating disease of dementia. Losing our cognitive ability and short-term memories, we become lost in our own world unable to make sense of the here and now and often become physically lost both to our families and friends but also in reality when we can’t find the associations needed to navigate in the world around us. I am not really sure how this collagraph relates to my thoughts but I made it with them whirring around in the background.

NB some people believe that Huginn and Muninn were linked to Odin himself and that through shamanic practices he would send his own thought and mind journeying across the world. Ravens have often been a bird that humans and mythic beings were thought to transform into.

As is usual with my work, there are layers of thought behind it and some I won’t be able to verbalise for a while (there is something about ‘ash dieback’ in there I think!). I often create my prints from ideas that are more instinctive and come from experiences that link to things I feel but haven’t found a way to express in words. This is why I love to meet people at art fairs and discuss my work with them. At the Saltaire Inspired Winter Makers Fair last weekend, I had some wonderful discussions about my new work and found that visitors were providing insights that made me feel like shouting ‘yes, yes, that’s it!’.

Finally, this last piece is part of my ‘animal, vegetable, mineral’ series that takes my feather collection as inspiration and links to manmade objects and the plant world. Here I have created collagraphs of a raven feather, a sprig of bog myrtle (sweet gale) and a piece of Viking hack silver which is actually from a former project. Bog Myrtle is thought to be a plant that the vikings used to create a drink which helped them ‘berserk’ before going into battle! There is an interesting article about the varied uses of the plant HERE.

Thank you to everyone that has visited the exhibition and for all of your feedback. I welcome your ideas and experiences about birds, folklore and my work so please do feel free to comment below.

Charms and Murmurings is on at Ryedale Folk Museum until 2nd November.

Cuckoo! Cuckoo!

Posted on October 1, 2025 by hestercoxprintmaker

Gawk, Gawk, Gawky, Gog, Gok, Hobby and Welsh Ambassador are all names for the Common Cuckoo, a bird synonymous with so many different superstitions and folklore that it is hard to know where to start! For me it is very much a bird that heralds the coming of spring. I often hear one calling from a small copse near the quarry in Horton-in-Ribblesdale in April.

The migratory cuckoo flies to the UK from North Africa and is only with us for a short time but has given its name to many things including a number of plants. There are lots of cuckoo flowers including cardamine pratensis (aka lady’s smock) and lychnis flos-cuculi (aka ragged robin). Cuckoo Bread is another name for wood-sorrel, cuckoo buttons for spear thistle, cuckoo boots for bluebell and cuckoo’s eye for herb robert to name just a few.

For Charms and Murmurings at Ryedale Folk Museum, I have based two prints on the cuckoo. Here is the first:

This three plate collagraph depicts the cuckoo itself, two ‘cuckoo flowers’ and a cuckoo feather and it gains its title from the Medieval English round ‘Sumer is Icumen in‘. This is also known as the Summer Canon or the Cuckoo Song and roughly translates as ‘summer has come’.

Cuckoos are well-known for being ‘brood parasites’ which means that they don’t build their own nests and, once mated, the female lays her eggs in the nest of another bird such as a meadow pipit or dunnock. It is believed that the cuckoo’s resemblance to a bird of prey helps to frighten the host bird away from the nest allowing the cuckoo the opportunity to lay her egg. She can lay up to 25 eggs in different nests of her chosen species (they usually have a preferred host) and will replace one of the bird’s existing eggs with hers. The baby cuckoo develops very quickly and, on hatching, often kicks out the remaining eggs or hatched chicks from the nest. The host will then raise her huge alien baby as her own.

Maybe because of this unusual behaviour, the cuckoo has also become a bird associated with fertility, infidelity and lasciviousness. The word cuckold describes the husband of an adulterous wife who might unwittingly raise a child from that union as his own. It is linked directly to the cuckoo and appears frequently in the works of Shakespeare. Gowk is one of my ‘animal vegetable, mineral’ collagraph prints:

For this series I have taken feathers from my feather collection (it is extensive!) or referenced an online feather library for the animal part. The vegetable part depicts a plant and the mineral is based on a real or imagined manmade object. In this case we have an undertail covert cuckoo feather, arum maculatum (aka cuckoo pint) and a pottery sherd from a Delft birthplate. Cuckoo Pint gains its name from the word ‘pintle’ which is an old English word for penis and the fact that somebody once thought it resembled a cuckoo’s penis. I’ve always known it as Lords and Ladies but apparently that too is a rather suggestive name with it originally being written as Lord’s and Lady’s because someone thought the plant resembled the genitalia of both sexes! With regards to the plate, I have two sisters and my mum commissioned a plate for each of our births. The traditional blue and white Delftware had our names, birth dates and the time of our birth was shown on the clock. If you want to see what the whole plate looks like, they are still in production, an example can be seen here. I created a collagraph/drypoint pottery sherd as my artefact just showing a part of the cradle.

These are just two approaches to the stories surrounding the amazing cuckoo. Celebrated in festivals across the country, some believed that turning a coin in your pocket on hearing a cuckoo would bring good fortune whilst others thought the cuckoo’s habits could determine the outcome of the year’s harvest. There’s a lovely blog post by Jo Woolf in Argyll where you can read about more beliefs here

In my next post I will be talking all about the raven. If you’d like to see my work and the lovely pieces made by Josie Beszant and Charlotte Morrison, you can visit our exhibition at Ryedale Folk Museum until 2nd November 2025.

Join Us for Bird Lore and Meet the Artist Events

Posted on September 17, 2025 by hestercoxprintmaker

Since 2015, I have been working with artist Josie Beszant and ceramicist Charlotte Morrison on a project called Collections. We have been exploring the human urge to collect—why we gather, what we choose to preserve, and how objects can hold memory, meaning, and emotion. We have been developing our work through a series of exhibitions and residencies, including partnerships with museums and galleries. Eight years after our first collaboration with Ryedale Folk Museum, we were delighted to be invited back with an exhibition of new work called Charms and Murmurings.

The exhibition opens this weekend with two events at the museum – Bird Lore with Sally Coultard and Friends takes place from 11.30 – 12.30 when Josie and I will be chatting to the best selling local author and newly appointed patron of the museum about her latest book and our exhibition, both of which explore the fascinating folklore of birds. For more information and to book a place, click HERE

In the afternoon, Charlotte, Josie and I will be at the museum gallery from 2-4pm in a Meet the Artist event. We will be chatting to visitors and answering questions about our new work.

The exhibition continues until 2 November 2025 and over the coming weeks I will be writing about the collagraphs that I have made and the stories behind them. I hope you will join me in exploring the different birds that are loved and feared in our folktales and embedded in our language, place names, and traditions.

Celebrating Meadows and Curlews! Two exhibitions to enjoy this summer.

Posted on July 24, 2024 by hestercoxprintmaker

It has been a long time since I wrote anything but I have plans for ‘short and sweet’ in future so that maybe, just maybe I’ll write more often than once every year! This post is just to let everyone know that I have two exhibitions on at the moment.

I’m absolutely delighted that Within These Walls has a new venue. The Folly is an old and fascinating building housing the Museum of North Craven Life and also the award-winning The Folly Coffee House! My hangings are gracing the upper stair well and the rest of my project is exhibited in the top floor gallery space. The museum is at Victoria Street, Settle, North Yorkshire, BD24 9EY and is open:
Tuesday – Saturday and bank holiday Mondays, 11:00am to 4:00pm (last admission 3:30pm)
The Folly Coffee House is open:
Monday-Saturday 10:00am to 4:00pm

The other exhibition is a fabulous project called Cry of the Curlew coordinated by Paco Valera and Barbara Murray whose photos and poetry document the plight of the iconic curlews of the Yorkshire Dales. As a longterm curlew admirer and campaigner, I am delighted to exhibit my collagraphs and Migration series prints in this important exhibition that has been previously been shown at the Dales Countryside Museum.

Here’s what Kendal Museum has to say:

The beauty and fragility of Curlews is highlighted through the stunning photography of Paco Valera and insightful prose-poetry by Barbara Murray. Inspiring artwork is on display by Sally Zaranko, Hester Cox, Judith Bromley, and Robert Nicholls, alongside the wire sculptures of Stephanie Smith. Swedish artists Emily Berry Mennerdahl and Jonas Böttern of Hillside Projects present work symbolising ecological collapse. A video and soundscape by June Gersten-Roberts features interviews with farmers on sustainability, along with Alastair McIntosh’s poem, Extinction set to the music of Loriana Pauli. A new watercolour work by Dr William Titley of In-Situ beautifully maps ‘The Curlew Way,’ as part of his Walking with Landscape project. A wonderful display by Curlew Recovery South Lakes will demonstrate the vital work they are doing to protect nests and support the delicate local population of these beautiful birds, as well as sharing ways you can get involved.

I’ll be taking a well-earned break in Scotland in August but when I return in September I will be starting new work celebrating some of our priority bird species of the Yorkshire Dales National Park.

Within These Walls: Hay Time in the Dales

Posted on May 9, 2023 by hestercoxprintmaker

My print installation, Within These Walls, created for a field barn at Grassington Festival in 2017 displayed with a hay sled.

After seven and half months of intensive work on my calendar linocuts, five new monotypes and a new collagraph, my exhibition at the Dales Countryside Museum is open and I’m delighted with how it looks. Fiona and her team have chosen an array of artefacts that were used for haymaking in the Yorkshire Dales along with a wonderful archive of oral histories and photographs of the Irish workers that came over to Yorkshire each year to help with Hay Time.

You can watch two films at the exhibition: one is an introduction to my studio with a collagraph printing demonstration and the other is the 2 minute film Paul Harris created of my installation in the barn.

There are also cabinets with some of Marie Hartley’s original wood engraving blocks, and the prints that I made from them, showing scenes from hay making in the 1930s. I started this project back in 2014 when I moved to Horton-in-Ribblesdale and began walking a footpath through and past three local meadows. Throughout the year I observed the rhythm of sheep farming, the change of the seasons and accompanying weather conditions in the meadows. I was able to observe the many different species of plant that grew and the visiting wildlife to the meadows. It became apparent that they were really good examples of species-rich traditionally managed meadows and I began drawing the plants and making prints of the wildlife that came to them.

Over the years, I’ve become familiar with the meadows across the Yorkshire Dales and interested in ‘nature friendly farming’. This exhibition celebrates the ecological diversity of healthy hay meadows as well as their agricultural and cultural history with the hope that visitors can enjoy and understand the contemporary importance of these wonderful landscapes.

The exhibition runs until the 17th September 2023 and is open daily, 10am – 5pm. Entry to the exhibition is included in the museum admission fee:

Adults £4.90
Concessions (60s and over): £4.40
Under 16s: FREE
Carers: FREE

You can buy tickets on entry or plan your visit by clicking to book online HERE

A Year in a Meadow in Linocuts

Posted on November 15, 2022 by hestercoxprintmaker

I’ve been beavering away on my meadow project and it’s time for a bit of an update. When I undertook my project with the Dales Countryside Museum back in 2019, I had always intended to create a series of linocuts as a homage to Marie Hartley’s gorgeous wood engravings but, as is often the case, I ran out of time and ended up sticking to collagraph. With this new opportunity to show my project at the museum I’ve been given another chance to achieve this goal. I decided that I will create 12 black and white linocuts that will illustrate life in a meadow over a calendar year. I have been taking note of everything that happens in our local meadows for the last eight years and have a wealth of photos, drawings and ideas. My neighbour that farms these meadows follows the traditional methods which means that she intermittantly grazes the meadows with a flock of ewes from September keeping the grass low enough to allow meadow plant seeds to germinate. In late October/November she introduces a tup to the ewes and he swaggers about the fields looking macho in his harness (it’s usually a texel and a friend rightly likened him to a nightclub bouncer). Then the ewes are back in with their lambs from early March through to the end of April. The fields receive a bit of farm ‘muck’ for fertilising at some point and then from May through to August, the meadows are empty of livestock and it is fantastic to see the speed at which the plants grow and the different species that are dominant at different times. The hay gets cut around mid-July and this year we were fortunate to witness the successful fledging of four curlew chicks.

Marie Hartley’s wood engravings show some of the stages in the haymaking methods of the 1930s & 40s and my aim is to show contemporary methods with my images. I’m not an adept wood engraver (maybe one day!) but I am pretty competent at linocut, having done it on and off since I left college, and the look of it and way of working share some similarities with wood engraving. They are both relief print methods and so you are printing the raised surface of the block. The image is created by the removal of that surface with sharp tools. In effect, you are creating white areas that don’t print plus the block is a mirror image of the final print so it does require a bit of brain power to design in that way. I sometimes think that printmakers have very specific kind of brains in order not to feel befuddled all of the time!

In the above images, you can see the linoleum (made from a mix of linseed oil, cork dust, resin and gum pressed onto a jute backing). It is normally grey but I’ve stained the surface with printing ink so that it is easier to see the cuts that I’ve made. I also use a white gel pen to draw on some more complicated areas so that I don’t make mistakes when cutting. You can’t easily put back what you’ve cut away so it is important to keep track of what you’re doing.

I’ve taken some time to look at the work of other artists known for wood engraving and linocut and the research has been really enjoyable. Having printed all of Marie Hartley’s blocks, I’m very familiar with her work but I also looked at the engravings of artists such as Charles Tunnicliffe, Clare Leighton, Howard Phipps & Clifford Webb. It is interesting to see how they handle different skies, how much detail they choose to put in and what kind of stylisation they employ. I’ve chosen to keep mine quite illustrational and very much about a specific place so you’ll see Penyghent cropping up in a few. Here’s the first proofs for May & June, I may ‘tweak’ them a bit before I edition them next year:

The photos are of proof prints in my sketch book so I apologise for the quality of the images!

I’m also making a series of smaller square linocuts that will depict some of the diverse wildlife species that rely on the meadows, and the plants/trees growing on the fringes, for their food and shelter. There is a delicate balance at work with certain insects only eating specific plants and then birds and animals relying on feeding from the seeds of certain plants or eating the insects of the meadows and further up the chain you have birds such as barn owls looking for the shrews and voles that live in and on the edges of the meadows and birds such as curlews relying on sheltered places to nest and raise their chicks. I hope that this print series will help to communicate the ecological importance of these traditional meadows.

Studying the Meadows

Posted on July 25, 2022 by hestercoxprintmaker

Looking across Ashes Pasture to a farmer cutting hay beyond.

For the majority of this year I have been working on what I call my ‘Meadows Project’. This is a continuation of the work that I started back in 2017 with my installation ‘Within These Walls’ and continued with a couple new prints inspired by haytime in the Yorkshire Dales as part of ‘View from the Fells: In the Footsteps of Marie Hartley’. As a result of a conversation with Fiona Rosher at the Dales Countryside Museum last summer, I’m delighted to say that I’ll be showing all the work created so far and a lot of new prints at the museum in the summer of 2023. It will be a joint exhibition with the DCM exhibiting their information and artefacts associated with hay making in the Yorkshire Dales.

I’m fortunate to have a number of excellent upland meadows very close to my home and I’ve been visiting a couple of them almost daily. To date, I’ve identified over 50 grass and wildflower species and numerous invertebrates. I’ve spent some lovely meditative days sketching some of the plants from life using Faber Castell Aquafaber pencils.

These drawings will be reference for new prints and I have the germ of an idea for a new installation piece. I’m also planning a series of black and white linocuts that tell the story of a contemporary dales meadows in a similar way that the gorgeous wood engravings created in the 1930s and 40s by Marie Hartley MBE showed us how haytime was done in the last century. Now that the hay has been cut, I will concentrate on developing some of the new work and plan to share that with you over the coming months.

My local meadows. We call them ‘Charlotte’s meadows’ after our neighbour as it is her family that farm them.

Back in the Meadows

Posted on June 27, 2022 by hestercoxprintmaker

*Pen-y-ghent seen from one of the beautiful local meadows on my daily walk.*

I cannot believe that my last post was in 2020! I’ve been so immersed in all the myriad of things that I do as a professional artist that I haven’t given myself the time to sit down and write. I’ve decided that perhaps ‘little and often’ would be preferable to not at all. Over the next few months I intend to write about some of the projects that I’ve been involved in lately but my main topic will be ‘Within These Walls’, my ongoing work concerned with the upland meadows of the Yorkshire Dales.

There will be an exhibition next year in collaboration with the Dales Countryside Museum. They will be exhibiting their wonderful artefacts and information about Haytime in the Yorkshire Dales and I will be showing all of the print works that I’ve created for the project so far. So…watch this space and I’ll be back shortly.

Marie’s List

Posted on June 29, 2020 by hestercoxprintmaker

As lockdown restrictions have eased, I’ve been able to revisit a few of the sites for my project and have enjoyed getting back to Keld, Muker, Birkdale and Semerwater. It has been interesting to see how the whole situation with Covid has impacted my work for the project. With the exception of teaching workshops, gallery deliveries, art fairs and exhibitions, I mainly work from home in my studio. As my work calendar quickly went from full to totally empty I found myself with plenty of time to myself and few distractions from other projects. At times, making new prints for my exhibition has been a struggle but at others, it has been a solace – something to become absorbed in allowing me to forget what was happening in the wider world. What I have noticed is that my focus shifted from making landscape pieces or larger single prints to much smaller work inspired by words and details.

As for many people, nature has become an even bigger inspiration during this time. The birds becoming active and migrants returning as spring arrived became of huge interest to me as I went out for my daily exercise. The songs seemed louder and the species more varied. I saw linnets in the lane, curlews in the field, oystercatchers nesting by the road, ring ouzels right next to the footpath on Penyghent and, with the absence of traffic and people, they all seemed bolder and more at ease. Meeting a local farmer on one of my walks, we stood across the lane from each other and discussed how we felt that the Yorkshire Dales was probably as quiet as it would have been a hundred years ago. I began listing all of the birds that I’d seen within my local area and I compared that with a list that I’d found in Marie Hartley’s diary (from 1943-47).

I’d already noticed the appearance of the corncrake on that list, a bird no longer seen in the Yorkshire Dales, and I started to make a note of all the birds on both our lists that have been classed as ‘birds of conservation concern’ by the BTO (British Trust for Ornithology) & RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds). “The assessment is based on the most up-to-date evidence available and criteria include conservation status at global and European levels and, within the UK: historical decline, trends in population and range, rarity, localised distribution and international importance” (BTO). The ‘Red List’ currently has 67 species of birds found in the UK that have been assessed as being at risk. Marie’s list of 66 birds includes: 1 that is now completely absent from the Yorkshire Dales, 14 that are on the red list, 23 on the amber list and only 28 are classed as being ‘green status’ in that they are plentiful and breeding well within the UK. I have a list of 68 species that I’ve seen and have been able to positively identify within the Yorkshire Three Peaks region. I can only guess at how much more abundant many of the species were in the early 1940s, a time just before agriculture was about to undergo major changes in intensification and mechanisation.

Wood engraving by Marie Hartley showing haymaking in the Yorkshire Dales.

I’m not an ornithologist and everything I know about birds has been learned from my mum (a retired ecologist) and my own research but I find the subject fascinating: worrying but also inspiring. On the one hand, it is of great concern that there are so many bird species now in decline but on the other hand, heartening to know that the Yorkshire Dales is home to so many of them. I decided to make a piece of work taking Marie’s List as a starting point. I wanted it to celebrate what we have in the Yorkshire Dales and also perhaps provoke discussion and interest in bird conservation and the reasons why so many birds are in decline.

As with all of my work, I started with an idea and that developed and changed as I made various decisions about what to include, where to focus and how to physically create the work. I selected 14 birds from Marie’s list that were either red or amber status. I decided to create an individual printing plate for each with her actual list reproduced in the middle. As I started to work out the overall design, I thought about whether I’d label the birds or not and once I decided that I would, I realised that the plates were starting to resemble the old cigarette cards that people used to collect. I have a few John Players ‘Bird of the British Isles’ cards and I love the size and detail of them. I made each little collagraph card using cutting techniques combined with gesso, acrylic medium & wood glue for texture. The labels were made by reversing text on my computer, printing it out, varnishing it and scratching the letters out to create areas of drypoint. I used a font that resembled letterpress type from the 40s.

Proof prints of some of the bird collagraphs with curlew and oystercatcher feathers that I found on a run.

I also like the link between these and the tiny wood engravings of individual birds that Marie created as end pieces for chapters in the Dales books. In fact I included three of the birds she depicted: Dipper, Curlew and Snipe.

Dipper, wood engraving by Marie Hartley

Snipe, wood engraving by Marie Hartley

Curlew, wood engraving by Marie Hartley

Dipper collagraph, Hester Cox

Snipe collagraph, Hester Cox

Curlew collagraph, Hester Cox

I wanted to recreate Marie’s handwriting so that the list would look as she’d written it. Normally I would use a photograph of the list and take it to a printmaking studio where I could use specialist equipment to make a printing plate such as a silkscreen or a photopolymer plate. This could then be combined with my collagraph cards to create the overall work. Unfortunately, during lockdown all the studios were closed and I wouldn’t have been able to justify travelling to them anyway (there are none that are within an hours drive). I considered ordering a photopolymer printing plate from a company but was put off by the expense and the lack of control over the quality. So I decided to go down the route of creating a drypoint using a reversed photographic printout from one of my photos of the page of Marie’s diary. It is a laborious way of working but very effective and probably exactly the thing to be doing when you feel out of sorts with the world around you. It took me two and half days to scratch out all of the letters but at the end of that, I had an intaglio printing plate that I could use alongside my little bird collagraphs.

Now to the printing part. I’d been ‘proofing’ each bird plate as I went along in order to check whether they worked and also because the pattern of light and dark backgrounds was quite important to the overall look of the print. I spent a great deal of time arranging and rearranging the cards to make the overall design aesthetically pleasing. Once I had proofed everything, it was time to make a ‘registration paper’ so that the spacing of the individual plates would be perfect every time I printed. It’s pretty straightforward, you mark on a piece of paper where each plate will go and draw out the rectangles. I then taped that to my press bed with a clean piece of tissue paper over the top. I could see the lines through the tissue but could take it off when it got dirty. The first print went quite well but after that, each time I laid the damp paper over the top the plates kept moving so that I’d end up with a wonky prints. To ink and wipe all of the plates for one print took up to 2 hours so after the second crooked print, I gave up and decided to work on the solution to the moving plates before I had another go.

I needed something to hold them in place that wouldn’t damage the plates and also wouldn’t create a ‘hotspot’ of added depth because that would make that area of the print darker due to extra pressure. Brian (my husband) suggested that I stick them to the tissue with smears of honey. Whilst I initially thought this would be really messy and unlikely to work, it did lead me to realise that I could try a small dab of bookbinder’s pva in place of the honey. It is a glue that is archival but that can also can be removed with water after it has dried. I put a tiny dab on the back of each plate which held it in place and then, after printing, I was able to wash the glue and tissue from the back of them without causing any damage to the plates. This is a bit of a revelation because I like using lots of plates to create a single image but the movement issue has often put me off.

So after a few weeks of work, the print is finished and ready to frame for whenever the exhibition goes ahead. We are now waiting to find out when the museum will reopen and what would be the best course of action regarding the dates for the show. I will let everyone know as soon as we have a definite decision.

Meadow Collection

Posted on May 7, 2020 by hestercoxprintmaker

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One of the pieces that I’ve made for my exhibition, ‘The View From the Fells: In the Footsteps of Marie Hartley’, is a continuation of a passion of mine that began a few years ago. Upland meadows are a wonderful feature of the Yorkshire Dales and people travel miles to see them during the months of late May and June and haymaking (or ‘haytime’ as it is known around here) is something that Ella Pontefract and Marie Hartley talked about a lot in their books. I have written a post all about the meadows at Muker HERE Unfortunately, across the country we have lost the majority of our haymeadows due to changes and intensification in agriculture but many landowners, farmers and conservationists are now working together to try to protect and conserve those that remain having recognised the ecological, cultural, agricultural and aesthetic value of them. I’ve been fortunate to live close to a pair of meadows that I have been observing for six years now and the incredible diversity of plant species, and the insects and birds that feed on them, continues to surprise and delight me.

In 2017 I created a large-scale print installation in a field barn which celebrated our upland hay meadows (see my blog post HERE). For my exhibition at the Dales Countryside Museum, I have gone to the other extreme and created a series of 95 miniature printing plates that form one larger piece. I wanted to reflect the colours and the myriad of plants and insects that can be found in just a small area of a traditional hay meadow. I have also been fascinated by the fact that Marie Hartley worked on such a small scale to create the wood engravings that illustrated the three Dales books and I wanted to try working on a similar scale myself. Going from 4 metre long printed hangings to tiny plates of often no more than 2.4 x 4cm was a challenge but also really enjoyable.

My meadow collection has been a long time in the making. I began the work last year when the hay meadows were in full flower. I spent time sketching the different grasses and flowers in preparation for making the plates. It became obvious that the piece would be something of a labour of love and I was tied up with other work last year so I put it to one side until January when I knew I’d have six months to work almost exclusively on the final work for the exhibition. The finished piece is created within an old print type drawer of the kind that you often see in junk and second hand shops. I’ve used smaller ones before in my Collections project and I like the way they give the pieces a museum quality with each print becoming an artefact within each space. I also thought that each individual print shown in a section of the tray would give the whole piece a feeling of a cross section of a meadow and there was a connection with Marie Hartley and her wood engraving blocks and the original books being created using letterpress.

I coded all the sections of the tray and then drew out rectangles in my sketchbook that related to each section. My aim was to try to depict all the plants that are typical of a healthy upland meadow and I also included a number of invertebrate species such as bees, moths, butterflies and beetles. These are attracted to the different species and in turn become food for birds and animals and so the whole habitat becomes a vital ecosystem. I set about making every drawing into a small cardboard collagraph plate using cutting and painting techniques. It was very fiddly and has made me realise how much my eyesight has deteriorated in my forties. Fortunately, I found that without my contact lenses I could see really well close up so I worked like that most of the time and then blundered round my studio looking for my glasses whenever I needed to see beyond my nose!

At the end of February I went to Ålgården Studios in Sweden for a fortnight of intensive work and I made sure that I finished making all of the meadow plates before I left. It had turned into almost a month’s work and I was paranoid about the plates getting damaged or lost so I stored them all in a wooden box in our house. I returned on 12th March just as COVID-19 was getting serious and printing the plates was the first thing that I did as we went into lock down. This situation has tested everyone and everyone’s experience of it will be different but I know I’m not alone in having gone through a period of anxiety, lack of motivation and difficulty in concentrating. Creativity is a strange beast and I find that I need very specific circumstances for me to feel inspired and motivated to make things and so I was very happy to have a box of 95 small plates to print. It was something that needed doing in order to complete the piece but all of the thinking and creative part had pretty much been done and now I just had to go through the time consuming practical part of inking, wiping and printing each one. I spent the next week and half doing just that whilst listening to audio books (thank you Ann Cleeves!) and podcasts. Do listen to ‘The Poet Laureate has gone to his Shed’ if you want to hear some excellent conversations between Simon Armitage and various creative people. (NB. I was once part of a group of fellrunners who helped Simon find his way off of Cross Fell and arranged for him to give a poetry reading in Dufton. He gave me his Mars bar…I’ve eaten it!).

Each printing plate is inked and wiped à la poupée which meant that I first inked them in sepia and then I wiped back the plant part of the plate with cotton buds and carefully applied the colours before then very carefully wiping again so that the colour was just a hint. The paper I printed onto was dampened and blotted so it was nice and soft and I printed groups up together with plenty of space for cutting to size. I used my etching press in order to get enough pressure to push the paper into all the details of each plate.

The prints were then left to dry. Using my dad’s old workmate and a table saw, I measured and cut a small block of MDF to fit each section of the tray. I’m notoriously accident prone and so it was slightly scary cutting with a spinning blade but I soon got the hang of it (with safety glasses and big gloves) and when all the blocks were cut, I painted the surface with gesso and then glued the prints in place using bookbinders glue so that they would be archival and last for many years. I then waxed the surface of each print with an acrylic wax to protect them before fitting them into place. The finished result was exactly what I was hoping for and I am pretty happy with it. Due to the huge amount of work involved, I’ve decided that I need to make it a small edition of ten in order to make it cost effective and so that I can keep one for future shows. I will make up two trays and then the others will be made to order. I’m now back to making more conventional collagraph prints for the exhibition and will talk more about some of those in a future post.

Hester Cox: Printmaker

Thoughts from Hester's printmaking studio and beyond.

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