Solo show at Serena Morton April 2022
Woodcuts from 1998 and 2022

Philip Larkin’s poem The Trees ends with a mystical invocation: ‘Last year is dead, they seem to say, begin afresh, afresh, afresh’.

It is a timeless sentiment that feels more prescient with every passing
year, not least at present. The cycles of arboreal regeneration and withering are set analogously against our shorter lives;

‘Their yearly trick of looking new is written down in rings of grain’.

The passing seasons leave their mark, everything is recorded. Now each Spring seems more poignant than the last, sharper, briefer, a surprising mid-winter gift. The prints in this exhibition span a twenty-four year period. Although they bridge decades of erratic creative growth, they feel entirely consonant. The shock of re-encountering one’s earlier work is like meeting your doppelgänger for a quiet drink; there is so much that is familiar, even prophetic but that you had forgotten or never realised. Bringing these two series together is a strange collaboration that seems to open out a wholly new set of approaches from familiar departures, a kind of spring gift from the rings of grain.

This year I completed a pair of woodcuts which I have been working on over the past few years. The solid hard wood blocks taken from the leaves of an inherited sideboard. Cutting relief prints is a vice, a secret pleasure that deepens. The joy is in the simple binary nature of the process, leave
or remove? Once the block is complete, or unable to be further worked, the printing begins.The blocks must now be reconsidered as templates
for generating coloured space. In both series chromatic effects are created by layered transparencies. In Treeforms this was through overprinting three blocks per print. Sometimes these blocks were printed more than once
or superimposed in different colours, mostly over an initial uncut coloured base-ground. On occasions there was additional oil pastel drawing.
The Spring Growth series is worked with overlapping chine collé areas akin to a printed collage.A print could be taken with a single inked hue or rolled with several coloured inks. Sometimes I went back to a print and overprinted sections with chine collé papers and then glued them in.
There are also monoprint tissues used as chine collé, further complicating the possibility of ingredients to be combined. Printmaking is playful, technically demanding but delightfully wayward in where it leads, endlessly open to change, or beginning afresh.

Mark Cazalet, 29th March 2022