Maggie Thompson is a Huddersfield based artist, currently working from a studio in Halifax. Her formal art education began later in life following a 6 week printmaking course at WYPW. After completing the course, Maggie began a BA in Creative Practice at Manchester School of Art, and subsequently, an MA in Fine Art, specialising in printmaking. She is now a member of Grounded Printmakers, a collective formed 2021 to facilitate exhibitions.
Maggie’s work has been featured in two solo exhibitions and numerous group shows, including The Master’s Etching Exhibition at Bankside, London.
“The pieces displayed in Source are a part of a large body of work which explores the virtual space of Google earth and Street view. I am fascinated that places I have never visited can become visually familiar to me. In making these prints, I did not seek to recreate the views I could observe, but rather evoke the feeling of being there. The windswept highlands of Mull in the Pilgrimage prints, and the stillness and heat of Amieira in Portugal.
In my practice, I always aim to relate the printing method to the idea being explored. Thus, these prints are made by scratching drypoint lines, and applying carborundum grit to the plate to mirror the forces of erosion and deposition which create a landscape.
Intaglio printmaking is a method which marries conceptual opposites. It is what has been removed from the plate that produces the visible marks of the print. This seemed an appropriate technique to use when transforming virtual space into something more tangible.
Each of the prints is abstract in nature and depicts only a small section of a broader landscape I observed on my screen. I worked in this way to reference the fact that the source of these prints was a digital image which becomes pixelated when inspected closely and ceases to have the same meaning. Everything one sees on screen is only a small section of the place, it is impossible to stand back and take in a view as one can in real life.”
