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by Laura Joint
Mary's art does the talking
Mary Gillett is in the midst of a black and white phase. You can tell this as soon as you walk into her printmaking studio, where her latest work is hung up on lines or laid out on tables: “The work is all very melancholic and atmospheric, and at the moment, it lends itself more to the dramatic effects of black and white images,” she explains.
“I’ll definitely be using more colour again, but I just need to get this black and white out of my system.”
"A lot of people find the work I do slightly ominous"
Some days, Mary’s studio is full of chatter from printmakers who come to her Tamar Print Workshops which she’s been running for 33 years. In fact, there aren’t many printmakers in Devon and Cornwall who haven’t passed through here at some time in their careers. Literally hundreds – from enthusiasts to experienced artists – have attended the workshops, and some have been coming here for years, eager to keep on learning and to connect with others in the printmaking community.
But today, the idyllically located studio in the West Devon countryside on the edge of Dartmoor is serenely quiet; all you can hear are the blackbirds singing their hearts out and an occasional ‘moo’ from the neighbourhood cows.
Among the prints dotted around the studio are those from Mary’s most recent series following a trip to Vancouver in Canada. Like all her work, the pieces tell a story beyond what you see in the image: “Usually, I’m inspired by atmosphere and mood and drama in the landscape. Some of my work has been described as apocalyptic! A lot of people find the work I do slightly ominous, that’s certainly been said about one of my pieces, Courting Lightning. In Canada, there was a powerful sense of history, and walking around Killarney Lake on Bowen Island, the symbolism of the dead trees on the lake was very evocative.”
Mary starts each piece with a sketch or a photograph, and she writes poetry which also comes into the work: “It has the same melancholia about it and the two align in terms of the kind of intensity I’m trying to explore. The lyricism of the pieces connects to the poems.”
Although she occasionally creates monotypes, as she is currently, almost all her work is traditional etching, an ancient form of art which she says has a language of “unique eloquence”.
She uses zinc plates as her surface, which she covers with a wax resist. The process involves drawing into the wax using a metal scriber before the plate is then dipped into a very weak acid solution.
This “bites” into the exposed metal to the desired depth. Once the wax is removed, the ink can be rubbed into the grooves in the plate.
Finally, a dampened sheet of printing paper is placed on top, and the print is run through the press under extreme pressure.
"Feelings that words just can’t express..."
“I love the sheer viscerality of the etching process, the whirr of the press, the contact with the materials, it’s messy, it’s unpredictable, and it’s very tactile. You don’t get the clean and instant results that you get in the digital world. A piece might take two days, two weeks, or two months, but it will have been years in the making, because of all those years of experience that go into it. The etching process gives you thinking time as the vision settles. When you reach the point where you’re satisfied, you make a print of it.
“And then you get the heart-stopping reveal. This is the thrill of it, when you run it through the press. The joy, for me, is in the accidents that can happen, and the surprising things that emerge which make the picture what it is. All sorts of unexpected things take place sometimes and they are what make the process so exciting and give each etching its unique quality. It’s what people love about it and why so many of us get addicted to it!”
Mary has lived in Devon most of her life, after her family moved from Hampshire to a farm in the Tamar Valley when she was four years old. When she left school at 16, she was “in a complete haze about what I wanted to do with my life”. The game changer came when she decided to return to education to take A-Levels. One of the subjects was Art, which is where it all started. From there, she did a Foundation Course at the then Plymouth Art College and later graduated with a Fine Art degree from the University of the West of England in Bristol. She also achieved a Postgraduate Certificate in Education and a Postgraduate Diploma in Printmaking at Brighton University.
She moved back to Devon in 1988 with her husband Hugh and their twin boys. They bought the house where she still lives today, always with the long-term intention of building a studio. Initially, she worked from a back room and then, in what was supposed to be a stop gap, she set up a studio in an old calf-shed at the family farm, where she launched Tamar Print Workshop in 1992.
Finally, in 2010, she moved into the lovely studio Hugh built in the garden at their home. It’s three times the size as the previous studio and it’s allowed Mary to expand the workshops to a larger group of weekly class participants, with other students also coming from further afield to attend short courses throughout the year: “There was very little resource for printmaking when I came back to Devon, and no real networking, everyone was working in isolation. When I look at the strong, supportive community we have now, I feel a great sense of pride.”
It’s quite a legacy, and Mary’s too modest to say it herself, but a main reason people come here is because of her renowned reputation and her respect in the printmaking community: “Many tell me that their careers have been shaped by the opportunities and resources that I offer,” said Mary. “And the quality of their work is very high. A lot of participants have been invited to show their work at prestigious exhibitions. But everybody is so different. Some people have always wanted to learn printmaking but only now have the opportunity.”
For Mary, the networking and positive feedback shared amongst the artists is key to constant development: “The whole thing is a learning curve for everybody, including the most experienced printmakers. And the more you are brave enough to take risks and break boundaries, the more exciting your results will be.”
Just outside the studio is a lovely little country lane with trees and open views, a setting for perhaps Mary’s most evocative pieces. It’s where she and Hugh would walk the dogs. Hugh died in 2019, and the pieces were conceived during his illness and produced during lockdown. The series of three are Walking Home, History Waiting and I Thought I Saw You, which she showed at an exhibition at Theatre Royal Plymouth: “A woman came up to me, pointed to Walking Home, and said, ’I don’t usually buy art, but I have to have it’. She lost her daughter at around the same time that Hugh was ill and there was something in the feel of the picture that resonated powerfully within her.
“That’s what it’s all about. I’ve never been inclined to verbalise the ideas behind my work. What I find so rewarding is the knowledge that I am connecting deeply with someone through the work about feelings that words just can’t express, or for which there are no such words at all.”
Gallery
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First published
October 2025:
This article was first published in Devon Life