A Liverpool Bestiary Since the year 2000 the printmaking area at Liverpool John Moores University has been host to over 30 printmakers in residence. Participating artists were primarily painters, sculptors, designers and those working in media other than printmaking. It was never the agenda to focus on any one style, movement or intellectual context but rather to follow the concept of a collaborative workshop philosophy in supporting our visitors, and as a result allow us simply to do some meaningful work that brought artists and students of diverse cultures and backgrounds together to share and collaborate. It was the intention to open up the institutional opportunities afforded by a metropolitan art school to a broad range of the international art community, and as a result act as a point at which cultural currents converge and diverse collaboration can be realised. The most recent iteration of this tradition is the Liverpool Bestiary project. A Bestiary is a medieval collection of stories providing physical and allegorical descriptions of real or imaginary animals along with an interpretation of the moral significance each animal was thought to embody. Although it dealt with the natural world it was never meant to be a scientific text. Some observations may be quite accurate but they are given the same weight as totally fabulous accounts. A great deal of its charm comes from the humor and imagination of the illustrations, painted partly for pleasure but justified as a didactic tool ‘to improve the minds of ordinary people, in such a way that the soul will at least perceive physically things which it has difficulty grasping mentally: that what they have difficulty comprehending with their ears, they will perceive with their eyes’ All participants shown in this catalogue have been asked to respond to these descriptions and produce a series of prints as part of a suite of work.
Neil Morris Reader in Contemporary Printmaking Liverpool John Moores University August 2018
John Hyatt
Craig Tattersall and Lizzie King
Marta Espana
Oihane Mcguinness Armendariz
Ines Larrinaga Zamora
Andoni Miguez
Itziar Lopez Sola
Nahai Ruiz Albizuri
Mikele Sotil Etxabe
Miren Barrena
Maider Azurmendi
Sandra Cadenas Sesma
Susana Jodra
Guillermo de Foucault
Javier Pereda
Patrick Thomas
Cristina Pelaez Navarrete
Antonio de Padua Canete Gonzales
Salvador Haro
Rocio Sacristan Cuadron
Inocente Soto Calzado
Jesus Marin Clavijo
Hannah Fray
Hannah Booth
Steve Hardstaff
Wuon – Gean Ho
Martin Kochany
Veronica Calarco
Koichi Yamamoto
Sigurรฐur Atli Sigurรฐsson
Karen Kunc
Carlos Santos Barea
Paul Davidson
Anna Houghton
Kostas Zochios and Lorna Fellas
David Armes
Lucy May Schofield
Angelica Vanasse
Andrew Smith
Tamara Sala Ablameiko
Patricia Hernandez Rondan
Blanca Garcia Castro
Irene Perez Ariza
Claudia Isabel Calvo Romero
Rio Sakai
Katie Jackson
Neil Morris
Emma Gregory
Dan Kelly
Patricia Guzman
Andrew Wilson
Takayuki Isomi
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank all participants for contributing towards this project. Special thanks to Liverpool John Moores University and John Hyatt for continued support with this project. To Steve Hardstaff for designing the cover image and to Carlos Santos Barea for photographing all of the work and for creating this catalogue, and Milos Simpraga for technical assistance.
If you would like more information about this project please email Neil Morris or Hannah Fray: n.morris@ljmu.ac.uk h.r.fray@ljmu.ac.uk