Q3 Awareness Post

I have chosen Anne Desmet as my awareness artist, who is a living contemporary wood engraver and printmaker based in London, UK. Her primary gallery representation is Eames Fine Art, and her work is also shown at Bankside Gallery in London and Kevis House Gallery in Salisbury.

Website: https://annedesmet.com/

She is a Royal Academician, elected in 2011; only the third wood engraver ever elected to the Royal Academy in its 256-year history. She was also the editor for the magazine Printmaking Today from 1998-2013 and has taught wood engraving at the Royal Academician Schools, British Museum, and Middlesex University.

She has earned a variety of awards, including:

• 2018: Honorary Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford University

• 2011: Elected Royal Academician (RA)

• 1989-90: British School at Rome Scholarship in Printmaking

• Multiple: Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award, USA

• Multiple: Three Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Awards, Montreal, Canada

• Multiple: London Original Print Fair Prize at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition

She has several collections and recent exhibitions:

Collections:

• Victoria and Albert Museum, London

• British Museum, London

• British Library, London

• Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

• Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

• Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester

• Pallant House Gallery, Chichester

• Museum of London

Recent Exhibitions (2020-2024):

• 2024: Guildhall Art Gallery, London (Solo)

• 2022-23: "Kaleidoscope," Pallant House Gallery, Chichester (Solo)

• 2020: "Scene through Wood: A Century of Modern Wood Engraving," Ashmolean Museum (Curated)

• Regular exhibitor at London Original Print Fair and Royal Academy Summer Exhibition

I chose to investigate Anne Desmet because she creates intricate wood engravings and collages focused on architecture and the built environment, similar to my own interest in industrial structures. She focuses on:

• The Tower of Babel (recurring motif exploring human aspiration and fragility)

  • After reading a sci-fi short story about the Tower of Babel, this particular motif was really interesting to me, as it plays with human ambition for achievement and defying nature

• Italian architecture (Rome, influenced by her British School at Rome residency)

• London cityscapes and urban evolution

• Layered collages combining wood engravings with linocuts

• The relationship between historical and contemporary architecture

Unconventionally, while she uses traditional wood engraving techniques, she often assembles multiple prints into collages under convex glass, creating layered compositions that blur the line between printmaking and sculpture.

Wood Engraver's Tower, 2020. Wood engraving, 30 x 25 cm, Edition of 45

This piece stood out to me because of how Desmet constructed a Babel-like tower entirely from objects from a printmaker's studio -- tools, books, and engraving equipment. I found it interesting how she turned the workspace into something monumental. This made me think about how I could incorporate random objects into imagery of bigger structures, rather than just depicting external industrial subjects in their raw form, like making an oil rig made of trash or something.

Babel Tower Revisited, 2018. Solarplate, linocut & wood engraving collage on paper under convex glass, 33 cm diameter

I found this piece fascinating because of the circular format and the layered collage technique. Rather than carving a single plate, Desmet assembled multiple prints into a composite whole. This additive approach is the opposite of traditional intaglio where you carve away, and it makes me wonder about whether I would want to try 3D effects too.

Manhattan Stars, 2017. Reduction wood engraving on Zerkall paper, 19 x 20.3 cm, Edition of 20

The reduction technique in this piece really interested me. In reduction printing, you carve and print the same block multiple times, removing more material between each color layer, meaning you can't go back. This destructive process feels related to etching's irreversibility once the acid bites. I appreciate how Desmet captures the geometric grid of Manhattan's architecture while the "stars" title suggesting something celestial in urban density.