Emma McLellan & Xavier Meade - Printmaking

Emma McLellan gave a lecture about her practice of printmaking and her influences and inspirations. McLellan spoke about how she was very interested in intricately designed wallpapers and animals, which influenced her work. What I really liked about McLellan’s works was that she used layers and layers of screen-prints on top of each other, which I thought must have been very hard to do, because aligning the screen on top of a print already done is quite difficult. I was surprised and to be honest, weirded out at some of McLellan’s works where she morphed several different animal parts together.

We also had a lecture from Xavier Meade, who works in screen-printing also. It was exciting, yet difficult to understand whenever Meade spoke, because of his heavy accent, but from what I could gather, Meade’s works really interested me. Unlike McLellan’s works where she uses realistic animals to create wallpaper type designs, Meade used screen-printing to make posters. Meade spoke of how he had a great passion for posters, and how this influenced his work. I was really interested in Meade’s statement about the people in Mexico having problems with reading, which was why most of their signs and posters relied heavily on the images rather than the text. I think it’s great that Meade uses this cultural context to drive his own works because it would benefit not only Mexican people, but also other people from different countries, which would break that language barrier.

In this image is a pottery design by William De Morgan, which I thought reminded me of McLellan’s animal works, because of how the figures are placed, and how decorative it looks. I like this piece of artwork because of the bright colours, and also because it somehow makes me think of those great Michael Angelo stained glass paintings.