Featured Artist: Joe Crossland

Glass, Iron, Stone introduces Joe Crossland, a GPS member since 2017. After participating in a weekend beginner course, he got bitten by the screenprinting bug, booked the next available intermediate level course, and joined the studio shortly afterwards.

Crossland's work focuses on architectural features, with subjects such as Glasgow's Central Station and Kibble Palace in the city's Botanic Gardens providing inspiration. Both share commonalities of iron structure and expanses of glass which Crossland explores by utilising the transparent nature of screenprinting inks to overlap multiple views, highlighting and celebrating the interplay between layers.

The Kibble Palace prints feature further layers of foliage and the human form (albeit rendered in stone) providing organic elements to juxtapose against the harder structural forms.

The nineteenth century marble statue of Eve by Italian sculptor Scipione Tadolini can be found in the centre of Kibble Palace and was the initial inspiration for a series of experimental prints exploring the experience of being in the glasshouse, incorporating different botanical structures alongside the iron roof and glass panels. Later prints have focused on aspects of different statues found in Kibble Palace - a hand, a foot - layered with foliage and the roof structure.

"My work starts with photography and I enjoy finding interesting angles which can be explored in novel ways through the screenprinting process. Early work, which focused on Central Station, experimented with the overlapping of different views, building up layers of transparent colour and generating unique representations of the space.

Kibble Palace provided further opportunities to overlap multiple layers - this time including softer elements of the human form and foliage against architectural structure. Despite the photographic source material, the prints are not literal representations - the resulting prints conjure a 'memory' of the space. While architecture is fixed, our experience of it is not: we inhabit and move through spaces, generating myriad perspectives - the most striking of which can be recalled to mind long after we have left the space. Each print evokes a memory, whereby multiple past views are realised in a series of overlapping layers."