Northern Stone and Peat Smoke by Anthony Ratcliffe

Anthony Ratcliffe

Kirkby Gallery, 20 May – 31 August 2019

Kirkby Gallery is delighted to present this new and never seen before exhibition, Northern Stone and Peat Smoke by artist Anthony Ratcliffe. Anthony is now a full time printmaker after many years lecturing at Manchester School of Art. He has prints in many public and private collections including The British Council, the Parliamentary Art Collection, Manchester Airport PLC, Manchester Royal Infirmary and MMU Special Collections.

Anthony works from drawings and material collected on site and has travelled extensively around Britain documenting remote landscape and particularly the way it shows evidence of past land usage, geology and archaeology. He also researches literary descriptions and historical associations. All his woodcut prints are hand printed in small editions and the artist works from a studio in Mossley overlooking the Dark Peak National Park. Recent projects across the North of England, Broken Ground, Rain Stone and Rust and Shoreline and Watershed, have included book art, watercolours and poetry as well as large woodcut prints.

This is the second exhibition by Anthony in Knowsley, having shown his Shoreline and Watershed exhibition in Huyton Gallery in 2013. This exhibition and collection of recent work has involved the artist exploring remote landscape, in many cases using contemporary poetry and text as a way of focusing on specific locations and features in the more hidden parts of northern Britain. The work records physical landscape and its relationship with flora, fauna and seasonal elements including the recent moorland fire damage.

The show will contain large woodcut prints, watercolours, drawings and sketchbooks as well as material illustrating the technical print process used. The woodcut prints are complex compositions in many colours and each one takes weeks of work to complete. For this collection of work the artist has explored the North West coast of Scotland, the Scottish island of Rum, the North Yorkshire Moors, the Yorkshire Dales, Coniston slate mines and the Pennine hills near where he lives and has a studio.