Clare Carter

The 'Erewyrehve' series is a collaborative project between myself and the artist, writer and musician Andy Abbott. I produced 8 reduction linocut prints, all different, based on a digital collage that Andy had created.

'I was developing some imagery to be used as artwork for an album of instrumental compositions to be released under my 'Andrew DR Abbott' and/or 'ADRA' monikers. The album is themed around a postcapitalist utopia called 'Erewyrehve', a concept I started developing as part of a residency in Istanbul in 2013. I had put some visual ideas together using collages of old postcards of Bradford and photographs of rocks on Ilkley Moor and approached Clare to see if she would use these as a starting point for a lino print. I have been a long-time follower of Clare's work and am especially taken with the prints she has been creating over the last few years. I thought her everyday-otherworldiness aesthetic would be a great fit with the music. Her treatment and interpretation of the collage has lifted it to another dimension and I hope will help the listener in immersing themselves in the alternate reality it proposes.'

Andy Abbott www.andyabbott.co.uk

This collaboration process was transformative for me, allowing access to another way of composing images before sending them through my reduction linocut process. The imagery is very evocative of the landscapes of my childhood; trips to run-down West Yorkshire towns and weekend walks along the moors. The dreamscape format that brings together these different visual and conceptual elements has shown me a way to incorporate all the personal documents and imagery that I would like to investigate in the future.

I moved to the island of Lanzarote in the Canary Islands in 2015. That year, the British artist Jason deCaires Taylor was commissioned to create a piece of public art for the island of Lanzarote, and it was installed in the harbour next to the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo in the capital, Arrecife. I saw the work when I lived there, and the accompanying exhibition at the aforementioned museum. The work consisted of 4 concrete sculptures of horses with riders; the riders being casts of local people and the horse’s heads symbolising oil wells, aka ‘nodding donkeys’. The work was first installed in the River Thames in London, and in both instances the sculptures were situated partially underwater, where the work is almost completely submerged and then revealed again by the rise and fall of the tide, highlighting notions surrounding climate change. Last year, the work was forcibly removed by the government. It was supposed to be there for at least 10 years.The work I have made is a response to this event, which I have entitled 'Living Museum'. When I discovered what was happening in Lanzarote, I immediately felt compelled to make something from the images I was seeing in the media. This ongoing body of work is an intuitive response, but I also consider it an attempt to document what has happened in Lanzarote so it is not simply another forgotten event in a sea of information.

For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to live on a volcanic island. After discovering I was pregnant in Lanzarote, this landscape has become synonymous with my sense of freedom and the need to pass this freedom onto my children. The process of printmaking encounters with the island has been a way to process memory, melancholic loss, and a hopeful future, from the position of a mother living in West Yorkshire.