“I love that linocut is such a hands-on form of making, and enjoy how it can be quite unpredictable”
Megan takes commissions. A block cut for you: a house, a plant, an animal, a scene that means something to somebody, carved and printed by hand in whatever number you want, down to a single print. She has been making custom pieces for buyers for years. Tell her what you have in mind and she will tell you what it needs.
Megan is a printmaker living and making in rural Angus from a home studio. She mostly works with traditional linocut relief printmaking, but enjoys experimenting in other forms such as dry-point etching.
She often works with reduction linocut, a destructive form of printmaking. She cuts a layer, prints it across the whole run, then cuts away more of the same block and prints the next colour on top of the first. By the last layer there is almost nothing left to carve. However many she pulled is however many will ever exist, and then the block is finished.
Megan's prints have an eclectic range of subjects, and she has never been interested in trying to shoe-horn her work into a consistent "brand". Working with a range of styles means her work stays fresh and interesting to her, and something she can stay passionate about.
Her prints include a series of detailed, single-colour witch's inventories, from the toad and moonshine of the Bog Witch, to the platform boots and Bauhaus record of the Goth Witch. There is also a crocodile inspired by traditional tattoos lying in honeysuckle, stylised snowdrops wrapped around a swan, candlesticks in sherbet colours, and a retro-futuristic ray-gun. Everything is sketched individually, carved into battleship grey linoleum, and inked and pulled by hand. This means no two prints in a run come out quite identical, and each piece is truly a unique art print.
Megan started cutting lino on a whim, after not quite finding her stride with other materials like watercolour and clay. She immediately loved the medium, and has been creating linocut prints for about eight years, fitting creativity around a full-time job. She works on her own from start to finish: sketching the designs, carving the block, mixing the ink, pulling each print by hand, signing each one, and numbering the editions.
Megan uses oil-based inks for lustrous, rich colour. She prints on archival paper that varies according to the piece to be printed. This includes soft, matte 250gsm Somerset for the single-colour witch prints, translucent Japanese Sunome Senaka for pastel coloured reduction prints, handmade Nepalese lokta for botanical themed prints, and dyed Thai mulberry when a vivid background is needed.
Where a paper is translucent she encloses a sheet of acid-free white backing so the colours hold once it is framed. Packaging is recyclable or compostable, and she mills her own paper out of misprints and junk mail.
