Loraine Monk’s visual arts practice derives from a sense of place and community. Originally a painter, she now creates images using both relief and etching processes.

Her family were working-class Londoners; inspired by local and community history, her background has influenced her politics, academic research, and artistic practice. Recently she has expanded her practice to include wood engraving as well as her work in Lino, Wood Cut and Etching.

She cuts into the surface of both art object and representation, exploring how the viewer might look underneath the image and its representation.

She uses use both relief and etching processes, depending on the subject, sometimes  working  between them. She  began printmaking by using lino cut because she was drawn to  the tactile quality of cutting, the physicality of digging and pulling- cutting away the surface to reveal the image.

She used uses the act of cutting and etching to develop  images that explicate , the visceral anger of inequality and political disengagement.

As a feminist and a trade unionist, many of the campaigns she is involved with,  Injustice, Protest, The Rights of women, Global warming/Climate change threats to the natural world, are central themes  in the work she makes.

Loraine Monk’s creates print  images using both relief and etching processes.

Her most recent work has focussed on Woodcuts and experimenting with larger plate etchings and monoprints…including creating print plates in galleries and other spaces outside of the studio setting… always returning to issues of protest and resistance, environmental destruction, occluded histories and fragmented memories

 

After Relief printing she was drawn to the narrative quality of etching  and its ability to  metamorphosis the plates as they are worked on. One of her favourite artists is Paula Rego.. she learned that the best story tellers, like her, like Goya ,  and Rembrandt, all worked the plates.. Rego  using sometimes nine different tones on an aquatint. Nowadays she uses use both relief and etching processes, depending on the subject, sometimes  working  between them..

 

She has exhibited in a number of independent Galleries, group shows and museums, as well as larger mixed shows, including the International Original Print Exhibition , the Society of Women Artists, New English Art Club.  Printmakers Council and Woolwich Contemporary Print fair.

Loraine Monk

Instagram and web address

https://www.instagram.com/lorainemonk/?hl=en

https://www.lorainemonkartmatters.com