Yvonne Appleby

My work falls into three distinctly different areas. Previously a university lecturer in Russian language and literature, I came late to printmaking initially with the desire to create a visual memoir. One can recall an event, an individual or an emotion many times but each time the experience feels new. What I remember I therefore give the appearance of news or a magazine feature in flat, montage images of places, times, people, feelings and odd objects with which I associate them. This current series represents my memoir up the age of twenty, when I was an undergraduate recently returned after three months at Leningrad State University in 1978.

The second area of my work deals in abstraction mostly in geometric shapes. Much impressed by the Russian Constructivists and taking architecture, landscape and music as a prompt, I explore the power of shapes suspended in space to express both the still and the dynamic. The current prints take local architecture as a starting point. Malevich’s black squares and a well-known form of confectionery combine the mystery of one and the familiarity of the other to represent the variety of the vast numbers of lives that buildings have witnessed between their walls.

Finally, I make highly textured prints, mostly intaglio, of trees, their bark and leaves. Trees never fail to inspire love, amazement and admiration in me for their sheer physical presence and power, and for the mighty life processes that they both contain and support.