• WhatsOn Arts and Crafts

Jo Gorner: Familiar Land

@ Northern Print

The series of prints in Familiar Land  are a creative engagement with a familiar  landscape and an extension of the understanding of place through a direct  intervention with the land surface. The work is an exploration of an encounter with physical form and place, a dialogue between process and practice.

Speaking about the work, Gorner said:

‘I am increasingly exploring the nature of engaging with familiar places rather than the ‘remote’ and how places can become redefined over time. Alongside this changed geographical focus, I am reviewing how I encounter the landscape physically, exploring a direct interaction with the land surface alongside my print practice.

The project  integrates a direct engagement with the land, printmaking and the history of the upland landscape in the South Pennines.’

Jo Gorner

Jo Gorner was born in Wigan, Lancashire in 1961 and studied at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford University and later at Manchester Metropolitan University for her masters, she has been living in Yorkshire since 1991.

Gorner is a printmaker of restrained and often austere imagery exploring the intimacies of the geographical landscape. Using a sparse vocabulary, with a subtle colour range, she achieves abstract images which are strongly linked to a place. These are landscapes which have an intense, underlying emotional source.

Within the abstraction and simplification of the imagery Gorner intensifies the essence of a composition, and creates a tension evoking anticipation, imminent resolution and movement. The gentle precision and beauty within the work is considered with care.

Although Gorner completed her first degree in painting at Oxford she has since concentrated mainly on printmaking, primarily etching. The process is an important part of the final image, the methodical rhythm and the gradual stages to completion. The acid adds a sometimes unpredictable nature to the work and the lines have a crucial hand drawn quality, away from the mechanical. The essence of the lines in the final prints sit softly on the paper, with an sensibility which reflects the inspiration behind her work.

A northern print event