Iona Howard
Iona Howard was born in 1964 at The Lizard in Cornwall, and specialises in carborundum, collagraph and monotype prints, handmade and hand printed in her studio near Cambridge.
She is captivated by the ancient semi-natural landscapes of her native west Cornwall, where a blurred line exists between nature and human activity, and where the field boundaries of West Penwith are among the world's oldest artefacts still in use. Her father, John Carlyon, was a sculptor who worked in Cornish serpentine, a rock unique to the Lizard peninsula, and those innate connections with the landscape continue to inform her work.
Her prints evolved out of monochromatic studies by introducing colour to reflect the changing mood and light of the Fens. The monochromatic work developed in parallel, out of a three-year collaboration with the 2017 Fenland Poet Laureate, Kate Caoimhe Arthur, which explores the concept of the sublime, the senses of home and alienation in a humanly fabricated natural space, and the precarious relationship between the ecological and the human. That collaboration has taken the form of talks, exhibitions, sound recording and numerous prints and poems, and a book of Arthur's poems and Howard's monochromatic prints is published by Dialect Press.
She was awarded an MA in Fine Art Printmaking at Cambridge School of Art in 2009, and previously studied at the Royal College of Art, Winchester School of Art and Falmouth School of Art. She won the Curwen Studio prize at the Royal Society of Painter Printmakers Summer Exhibition at Bankside Gallery in 2012, and the Hawthorn Printmakers Award for Most Interesting Use of Medium at the Cambridge Original Printmakers Biennale in 2018. Goonhilly Downs and White Downs State III were selected for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibitions of 2015 and 2016. She is represented by Cambridge Contemporary Art and by Arundel Contemporary.
Artist Statement
My prints use figuration and abstraction to portray the landscape of places I know well. The sources can come from working en plein air or expressing landscape filtered through memory. The physicality of my approach to the printing process combined with a contemplative exploration of surface makes the subject spontaneous and vibrant whilst capturing an intimate connection with the landscape.
I have lived on the Fen Edge near Cambridge for the last twenty five years and the focus of my work is the meeting point of land, horizon and sky, their flatness altering the perception of distance.
I predominantly use carborundum in my printing process, a technique where a mix of a binder and carborundum grit is applied onto the surface of a plate and inked up. It provides highly embossed, velvety textures and rich, dense tones. To contrast the carborundum, drypoint is added to produce an incised line, which is characteristically thin, linear and precise. Colour is introduced by layering carborundum plates or more often realised though monoprint. I print to the edge of the paper to leave the composition as unconstrained as the landscapes from which I seek inspiration.