Artist's Statement
Gill Tyson specialises in lithography, a printmaking process that combines direct and expressive mark making with deliberate and aforethought building of layers. In cool, atmospheric colours the artist explores remote landscapes. Her ever-present brushstrokes indicate a distilled image; an abstracted world that only hints at a human presence. Her work has been likened to painting in slow motion.
Tyson trained at Edinburgh University and Edinburgh College of Art, where she graduated with an MA in Fine Art. In 2012 she was one of the artists representing Britain in The International Print Exhibition in Kyoto, Japan and in 2014 was Printmaker Of The Year at Printfest. She was a prizewinner at the Society Of Scottish Artists on 2018. She has undertaken a number of printmaking residencies in the UK and abroad.
Her work is in several public collections, including the Parliamentary Art Collection and The City Of Edinburgh. Gill lives between Edinburgh and Morvern, a remote peninsula on the West Coast of Scotland
“I use many printmaking processes, but most of my prints are stone lithographs, a process which is based, at its simplest, on the premise that water and oil don’t mix.
An image is drawn on the ground surface on a slab of limestone with an oil-based medium. Once the image is given a gum etch, which releases a tiny layer of oil into the stone, water is repelled by the oily image and stays on the non-drawn areas of the stone. Next the oil-based ink is rolled across the entire surface of the stone but the ink will cling only to the oily image, not the dampened areas. Paper is then laid on the stone and run through the press and the image is magically transformed into a print. Then the stone is ground again and the image for the next layer of colour is drawn. I often combine lithographic images with monoprint or screen printed layers of colour. There’s an infinite number of ways lithography can be used to make images and I’m always learning.”