Lucy Bainbridge arrived at the Eames Collectors' Studio on a suitably grey and rainy Saturday morning – "I was a bit disappointed when I woke up," she told Vincent Eames, “Because I knew I'd be missing all this lovely rain by being inside – the first heavy rain we’ve had for weeks!" For an artist whose entire practice depends on exactly this kind of weather, it's ironic that the best shooting conditions of the summer arrived on the day she’s here to talk about them.
We invited Lucy into Eames to celebrate a milestone: this year's Royal Academy Summer Exhibition marked the tenth time she's been invited to show there. "Which I commented means that I'm just very old!" Lucy deadpanned – but the real story, as Vincent drew out over the course of the talk, is of an artist twenty years into her career who is still restlessly reinventing how she works.
Westminster Bridge (View from the Number 12 Bus) - Screenprint with graphite dust.
From graphite dust to wood grain
Lucy trained in traditional printmaking at Camberwell in the early 2000s, and for years her London views – Big Ben, St Paul's, "an awful lot" of Battersea Power Station ("I didn't realise until I put a catalogue together that Battersea's been in the RA five times – I really need to change my subject matter") – were built from screen printing over graphite dust. It's a technique she loves, but one messy enough that she had to work inside a tent rigged up in the corner of her studio to stop annoying everyone else. "It is really messy," she admitted, "but I keep going back to it – I think it's a really nice process."
About eighteen months ago, looking for something "a bit cleaner," she stumbled – deliberately, if not exactly gently – onto Mokulito. It didn't stay clean for long. As Vincent put it, this is an artist who keeps giving herself the hardest possible version of every technique.
Watching Time from the 12 Bus - Mokulito print
What is Mokulito?
Lucy first heard about Mokulito from someone in her print studio who'd taken a day course in Barcelona. "It's taken me about two years to remember how to say it," she laughed, "because it sounds like a cocktail." Moku is Japanese for wood; lito is litho – and the process really is traditional lithography, just swapping the usual metal or stone plate for a sheet of Japanese plywood.
The plate is sanded to give it "tooth," then a photographic image is screen printed onto the wood using a waxy litho ink. Once that's dried in, the whole plate is coated in gum arabic, which soaks into the untouched wood and teaches it to repel oil-based ink everywhere except where the waxy image sits. It works exactly like classic lithography's grease-and-water principle – except the wooden plate is, by nature, slowly being worn down and is disintegrating the entire time. The gum arabic doesn't hold forever, so with every pass through the press the grain pushes further through the image, until eventually the plate is, in Lucy's word, "dead." Wood quality, temperature, luck – all of it plays a part, and Lucy is candid that some plates simply refuse to cooperate for no reason she can identify.
Power Station (View from the 24 Bus) - Mokulito Plate
Catching London in a glimpse
The results are unmistakably Lucy’s recognisable subject: London landmarks seen through a rain-streaked bus window, never posed, never tripod-still. Lucy shoots from the front seat of the top deck, chasing what she calls a glimpse – a moment of motion and distortion rather than a clean record. She described a recent mission to photograph the Albert Hall that involved hopping on and off several buses, holding out for the right combination of rain and an empty front seat. The wood grain that inevitably creeps into each Mokulito print does double duty here, standing in for glass, streaks, weather – an extra, uncontrollable layer of atmosphere laid over the subject underneath.
Westminster Bridge (from 12 bus) - Mokulito print
Asked whether the mood of the work – rain-soaked, quietly melancholic – bleeds into how she feels making it, Lucy didn't dress it up: "I really like this mood – maybe I'm just quite a miserable person at heart! But then I do keep thinking maybe I should do something a bit happier. But yes, basically I just quite like the rain." She was quick to add that the work isn't intended as commentary on the weather we've been having – though she'll happily concede it's hard for rainy London cityscapes, made in recent summers, not to carry a little of that conversation with them.
Southbank from 12 Bus - Mokulito print
Editions that dissolve as they're made
In the Q&A, one collector asked the question: how do you run an edition from a plate that's degrading with every print? Lucy explained that editions are typically small – six to twelve – though sanding the plate back and re-screening the original image can stretch a run to around twenty-five if she’s lucky. Because the wood keeps breaking down throughout, no two prints in a series are ever quite identical; each carries a little more grain, a little less of the original mark, than the one before it. She also uses a bitmap dot pattern for tonal work, which softens slightly as the ink rolls onto the wood – giving the prints a painterly quality that resists looking digital. And for anyone drawn to the process as much as the image: once an edition is finished, the original wooden plates themselves are sometimes available, as beautiful one-off objects in their own right.
Watching Time from the 12 Bus - Mokulito Plate
Next stop, Glasgow
Lucy is heading to the Glasgow Print Studio in a fortnight, chasing bigger presses and, with them, the chance to work at roughly double her current scale. "They've just got some big presses," she said, "so I'm going to go and ‘abuse’ their studio!" A one-week residency doesn't leave time to both shoot new locations and run the full printing process, so she'll arrive with images already prepared – meaning the results, when they come back, should be similar in style and subject, just considerably larger.
April Showers (On the 139 Bus) - Mokulito print
Eighteen months in, and by her own admission, Lucy still feels she's only "scratching the surface" of what the technique can do. Watching her talk through it – equal parts precision and happy accident – it's easy to believe there's plenty more to come.
We certainly hope there is. Lucy’s talk was a reminder of how much there is to discover when artists share not only the finished work, but the experiments, patience, humour and occasional frustration behind it. We look forward to seeing where this remarkable new chapter in her practice leads - and to welcoming you to future talks at the Eames Collectors’ Studio.
A number of Lucy’s artist's proofs, some more works from new editions and a small selection of the original wooden plates, remain available from Eames Fine Art. These can be viewed on our website and at the Eames Collectors’ Studio any weekend.