Two prints from early in Eileen Mayo’s career show the strength of her natural ability. Eileen was nineteen and studying at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, London, when she made the wood engraving Skaters. She made Turkish Bath a few years later in response to an invitation to put work in the Second Exhibition of British Lino-Cuts at the Redfern Gallery, London. Her invitation came from Claude Flight, the linocut’s principal champion, who reportedly instructed her on the technique over the telephone. She had met Flight, a teacher at the Grosvenor School of Art, while working there in 1929 as a life-class model.

(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- )

Paul Nash was a member of England’s Society of Wood Engravers in the 1920s, and this work, one of his earliest wood engravings, highlights his instinctive approach to the medium. Rather than be tied down by traditional wood-engraving practices of precision and accuracy of line, his mark-making is free and immediate. A jagged, hard-edged perspective intensifies the scene. The waves breaking on the seawall form a series of varied, simplified patterns and shapes. The elongated figures, dwarfed by the wall, intensify the scale of the structure. Nash’s rough and intuitive techniques in cutting the end-grain wood serve to intensify the image and highlight an artist approaching a medium with much tradition under his own terms.

The Golden Age 18 December 2015 – 1 May 2016

One of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most talented printmakers, Leo Bensemann was a natural with the notoriously difficult wood-engraving medium. The potential for highly detailed imagery suited the artist, and here he has cut the patterns and shapes with painstaking care. Shurrock encouraged printmaking with his students, and the similarities between cutting away the surfaces of wood-engraving or linocut blocks and carving sculptures would have no doubt appealed to the teacher.

(Dear Shurrie: Francis Shurrock and his contemporaries, 8 March – 13 July 2025)