Featured Artist: Janie Nicoll

"No man is an Iland, intire of itselfe; every man

is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine;…"

                                                      John Donne 1624

Glasgow Print Studio is pleased to present Janie Nicoll as the Featured Artist of October. The exhibition titled Islands presents a new body of work, employing photographic images captured by the artist during recent excursions to the remote island archipelagos of St. Kilda and the Skellig Islands, off the west coast of Ireland. Created over the past year, the exhibition explores concepts of human utopias and cultural identity. Additionally, themes relating to climate and sustainability have been a central element of Nicoll's practice, resulting in recent large-scale collage works that incorporate landscape imagery, recycled materials, and the Gaelic language, works which the new prints presented here directly relate to.

After completing an advanced woodcut course at Glasgow Print Studio, Nicoll has expanded her relief-printing practice to include laser etching. This approach allows her to combine hand-cut and photographic elements in her prints.

The exhibition consists of new relief prints and digital collage works that incorporate recycled detritus of materials such as newspapers, dictionaries, maps - all printed matter made relatively redundant by recent seismic shifts in digital technology. Nicoll's use of relief printmaking as a method of production delights in the traditional method of 'hands-on' creating and the gradual construction of multiple reductive layers of colour, culminating in a final photographic layer that finalises the image. The outcomes can be unpredictable and necessitate a certain level of patience, which is again at odds with faster, more contemporary technologies and methods of production.

Janie Nicoll is a Glasgow-based visual artist working across painting, collage, printmaking, installation and digital imaging. She has a BA in Drawing and Painting from Edinburgh College of Art and an MFA from Glasgow School of Art. Nicoll has exhibited nationally and internationally and has received numerous awards and residencies, including the Richard Ford Award from the Royal Academy, a John Kinross Award from the RSA, Creative Lab residencies at CCA Glasgow, and Rough Mix residencies with Magnetic North Theatre Company. More recently, she exhibited in the Scottish Landscape Award 2025 and co-curated Rupture/Rapture: Womxn in Collage with Sam Ainsley and 16 Collective at Patricia Fleming Gallery. She currently hosts a monthly radio show, Art & Indy - the DIY Scene, on Sunny Govan Community Radio 103.5 FM, bringing together her interests in visual art, music and grassroots culture.