Events
SLAUGHTERHAUS runs a series of studio events throughout the year - including exhibitions, artists’ talks, film nights, open studio weekends and community workshops.
Our classes, exhibition programme and associated programme of talks and film nights in 2019 take the theme of Place as a starting point.
We have invited artists to exhibit this year who are exploring this theme, and will have a series of talks and events as part of this exhibition programme. Some of our courses will also encourage participants to explore this notion of place in their work.
Save the date for our Winter Studio Sale. Stock up on hand-made cards, prints and gifts for Christmas. Find out about our courses in 2024 and join us for a glass of mulled wine and a mince pie.
Artists exhibiting this year include Michelle Avison, Helen Breach, Fiona Mcneil, Claire Willberg, Sarah Praill. More names to be added- watch this space.
JAMES ANDERSON’S new exhibition (from 9-29 September) is called “Things being Various”. Like his previous one, it is named after a line from a poem – Snow by Louis MacNeice. The poem evokes the suddenness of the poet’s realisation of the contrasts and diversity and plurality of the life around him; of life itself:
“World is crazier and more of it than we think, …incorrigibly plural …The drunkenness of things being various.”
James’ work – large, painterly, colour-dense carborundum abstracts, delicate etchings and graphic, layered wood-cuts – suggest a very literal expression of “things being various”. But the joy of the show is not (simply) in this display of printmaking craft, it is in the artist’s ability to tease out a scatter of moods and images that visualise a world within: his world. These are works that seem to capture the most fleeting of inspirations – the colours of the Atlas mountains, a view seen through the inside of a friend’s house, the fall of a shadow under a tree – interpreted through the solidity of print.
MacNeice’s poem begins with the words, “The room was suddenly rich”, and there’s a sense of that suddenness, that ephemeral shock of memory/joy/excitement/drama in much of the work. James’ strength is his ability to create images that reflect that suddenness; they feel as though they’d just burst into his consciousness; the prints shout, “see what I see, feel what I feel”. He has the craftsman’s ability to work with, and create work, born of the studied carefulness of printmaking (layer upon layer of ink and chine-colle paper and acid eating into metal and hard steel gouging into slabs of wood) that has been coaxed to yield rich emotional immediacy.
James has said that it was only after his introduction to printmaking that his innate creative sensibility was able to express itself; that, as he puts it, “the possibility of art could exist”. He is an artist for whom the idea and its execution are so closely interlinked that one could not exist without the other or to retreat to an old cliche, “the medium is the message”.
And herein lies the tension that electrifies all his work: the synaptic spark of ideas. The work is grounded in the cerebral, philosophical truths of a poem (akin to Gombrich’s reference to “the possibility of metaphor [in art]”). And at the same time, as the visual reality of the work– the “ocular truth” – suggests, it is effortlessly free, “lively” (his word) and expressionistic.
In his inner world, of things being various, the cerebral is merged with the celebratory.
Lee Johnson
16 September- 29 September 2022
Periphery, an exhibition of recent prints made by Rob White over the last two years, is presented over two floors of SLAUGHTERHAUS.
The work sits on the edge of landscape and abstract, the prints are a window out to another world. Rob's use of colour is sometimes apocalyptic, hot and fiery and sometimes cool and calm -a satisfying place to inhabit.
Featuring spit bite and chine colle etchings and carborundum prints, the prints explore the painterly qualities of these processes.
Rob thinks of the work as a place for reflection. A place to breathe and contemplate.
Like a photograph, the prints are a snapshot of time- but an imagined moment. Some are like moments of calm before or after the storm, others are reminiscent of the recent forest fires and the hopelessness one might feel during or after these horrible events. A number of the works reflect the peace and quiet of a country walk or a tranquil walk along the cliffs accompanied by the power of the sea.
Rob’s work explores feelings of hopelessness or the powerless that many of us feel in the face of inaction on climate change. It has a political intent- it is made in the luxury of growing up and living in a democratic and fair country. They are made as a necessary action for the survival of the artist.
Rob supports and brings attention to mental health issues -and will be donating 10% of all sales to the charity, Mind.
“Mind the mental health charity. Fighting for mental health - for support, for respect, for you”
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In Conversation, Thursday 29 September 7pm Rob White and Lois Oliver discuss Rob's work and ideas. Dr Lois Oliver is a Curator at the Royal Academy, Professor of Art History at the University of Notre Dame (USA) in London, and Visiting Lecturer at the Courtauld Institute ( and also a Morley printmaking student!).
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1 September- 4 September 2022
That Girl Has No New Ideas, an exhibition of recent prints and animations by Mia Thomson.
SLAUGHTERHAUS will host an exhibition of young illustrator, filmmaker and printmaker, Mia Thompson, at the beginning of September. Mia has worked in monotype and etching, and will also be showing a selection of her stop motion animations.
The exhibition is a visual record, a diary of sorts, of Mia’s incredible journey away from crippling artistic silence. “About a year ago, I found that I’d lost part of myself…it was really scary” she said. This exhibition documents the pathways to her recovery from that sense of loss.
Unsurprisingly, the focus of the art - raw, unrestrained, nakedly honest - is entirely autobiographical. This is Mia making art about, and as a result, of being Mia. The prints externalise the artist’s private, intimate conversations with herself…her own “monologue interieur”.
They’re visualizations of feeling and thought.
The result is work that is both memoir and catharsis. For each print offers a double-sided perspective: both an image of agony remembered and a statement of joy rediscovered…the joy of an artist finding her ‘voice’ once again.
The question that always arises with an exhibition such as this one, is whether the work is purely esoteric and self-centred, or whether viewers will see in her images, reflections of themselves.
One way to find out.
Mia Thompson ‘In Conversation’ with studio director Michelle Avison, Thursday 1 September, 6.30pm.
The exhibition runs September 2 – 4th at SLAUGHTERHAUS Print Studio.
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As part of our ongoing HAUSPRINT Artists' Talk Series, Michelle Avison, Director of SLAUGHTERHAUS, discusses how printmaking has informed her art practice over the last 30 years.
See the full list of Artist Talks here...