Patterns in Printmaking: From Surface to Form - 2025

The course is inspired by a passion for patterns – patterns in works found throughout art history, but also those that surround us in daily life and often go unnoticed. When you start to look through the pattern lens, they are everywhere. Shadows falling through leaves of an oak tree, cutting sharply through a chain-link fence, reflections in windows, the tiles of your kitchen floor, clothing motifs, and wallpaper.

We will explore mark-making techniques inspired by rhythm and allow fresh and unexpected gestures and movements to happen, building our patterned languages. We’ll work through intaglio techniques such as aquatint, hard-ground, soft-ground, chine-collé, and carborundum. Through your chosen making processes, you will find yourself inking, printing, carving, scraping, adding, erasing and repeating to achieve unexpected and exciting results.

Through expansive and experimental approaches to printmaking, we’ll explore how to break down the traditional borders of what a print can be. From using the press to breaking away from it, we’ll reimagine prints in new forms – moving beyond the flat surface of the wall. Participants will experiment with innovative printmaking methods, combining elements like drawing and collage to push the medium into uncharted territories.

The course emphasizes exploration over perfection, fostering a prolific, collaborative, and stimulating studio environment. Group discussions will allow us to exchange ideas, reflect on our work, and encourage creative evolution.

Information

Venue: Festung Hohensalzburg
Date: 21. 7. – 2. 8. 25
Teaching language: English
Participation fee: 670 Euro (reduced 495 Euro)
Requirements: Readiness to develop new and experimental ways of printmaking; you must be willing to work and share ideas in a group and work autonomously
What to bring: Materials and images/drawings to work from, sketchbook, preferred drawing utensils, working clothes. If you already own the materials next listed and would like to use them, bringing your own instead of buying them at the school, please do so: printmaking tools (lino/drypoint needles etc.) watercolors/ water-soluble pencils for monoprinting, tissue paper for chine-collé, holey and textured materials like fruit netting/lace to use as stencils. Thin plastic sheets for drypoint and monoprint (preferably between 0.9 and 1.2mm thick).
Maximum number of participants: 16

Hannah Tilson

Hannah Tilson (b. 1995) lives and works in London. She earned a BA from the Slade School of Fine Art (2018), completed the Royal Drawing School’s Drawing Year (2021), and attended the New York Studio School exchange. She was an artist-in-residence at Plop (2024) and Palazzo Monti (Sept 2022). Tilson participated in the Whitechapel Gallery Art Icon 2024 and published a monograph in 2023.

Tilson works in a variety of media: painting, mixing raw pigments and binder, drawing, printmaking, and embroidering. Building up layers of translucent and opaque colours, concealing and revealing parts of the image, Tilson camouflages herself in vibrating and fragmented spaces filled with patterns. She views her body and the fabrics encompassing her as a landscape/pattern of rhythmic and geometric forms. The figure disappears and reappears, sometimes being completely swallowed up by the fabrics, while at other times a hand or a shoe surfaces, taking the viewer closer to their own reality. The ambiguous shapes become a changeable part of this layered world, allowing the viewer to question what they see. In this fast-moving, turbulent space, abstracted through the pattern lens, something seems familiar, yet abstract … Nothing is as it seems.

Website

http://www.hannahtilson.com

Exhibitions

Solo exhibitions
2025 Staged Surfaces, Cedric Bardawil, London.
Bridge I Brücke (with Otis Blease), kura-t kunstraum traklhaus, Salzburg (AT).
2023 Soft Cut, Cedric Bardawil, London
2021 Swoosh, Well Projects, Margate (UK).
2017 Tongue and Chic, Peckham Pelican, London.
2016 Hannah Tilson Final Exhibit, NYSS, New York, NY (US).

Group exhibitions
2025 Artistic Noise Charity Auction, Kasmin Gallery, New York, NY.
Great Ormond Street Charity Auction, Christies, London.
London Original Print Fair, Somerset House, London.
Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair.
2024 Whitechapel Gallery Art Icon, London.
Tessellations, Cedric Bardawil, London.
Patterns of Intimacy, MINT Gallery, Munich (DE).
London Original Print Fair, Advanced Graphics stand, Somerset House, London.
Drawn Together, Royal Drawing School Summer Exhibition, London.
Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair, Binder of Women & Advanced Graphics, London.
Art on a Postcard – International Women’s Day Auction. Fierce Form, Baert Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (US).
2023 Phantom Brush, A plus A, Venice (IT).
Cure3, Bonhams, London.
London Art Fair, Stand von Advanced Graphics, London.
2022 London Art Fair, Advanced Graphics booth, London.
DREAM BABY DREAM, Paint talk at Fitzrovia gallery, London.
2021 Best of the Drawing Year, Christies, London.
Small is Beautiful XXXIX, Flowers Gallery Cork Street, London.
Salvaje Y Dulce, Galerie Badr El Jundi, Marbella (ES).
The Drawing Year End of Year Exhibition, Royal Drawing School, London.
The Drawing Room, Berntson Bhattacharjee, London.
Pacific Breeze II, White Conduit Projects, London.
ArtUk Auction, Online. Original Paper Works, Online.
2020 Cure3, Bonhams, London.
London Art Fair, Advanced Graphics both, London.
2019 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts, London.
Guts Gallery Inaugural Exhibition, Guts Gallery, London.
Voi rubate del tempo alla fretta a noi il mare ci impone lentezza, Castro Projects, Rom.
18/11/1, PMQ, Hong Kong.
2018 Paper Cuts, The Saatchi Gallery, London.
The Lotus Eaters, Aindrea Contemporary, London.
BA Degree Show, Slade School of Fine Art, London.
Hot Milk, Post Institute, London.
The Pink Panther Show, Gallery 46, London.
2017 From Cornucopia, Center for Recent Drawing, London.
2016 Art is the Highest Form of Hope, NYSS, New York, NY.
Topless Palaces, NYSS, New York, NY.
Legumes, 4 Malden Road, London.

Publications

Steer, Emily, 10 Must-see shows during Frieze London 2025, in: Artsy, 2025.
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-10-must-see-frieze-london-2025

Hallstrom Sofia, How to do Frieze Week 2025, According to Insiders, in: Artsy, 2025.
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-frieze-week-2025-insiders

Parker, Billy, Frieze London 2025, Everything to see and do, in: the Evening Standard, 2025.
https://www.standard.co.uk/culture/exhibitions/frieze-london-2025-must-see-shows-b1252287.html

Hobas, Vannia, Swooshing Perpetually like a river unfolding in front of us, in: Magazin 53a, 2025.
https://magazin53a.net/hannah-tilson-swooshing-perpetually/

Photo: Sarah Wilson

Otis Blease

Otis Blease (b. 1996) studied drawing and printmaking at the University of West England, Bristol, in 2018, where he was awarded the Dumfries House Residency on graduation. In 2019, he undertook a postgraduate scholarship course at The Royal Drawing School. Both drawing and printmaking continue to form the basis of much of his work, in addition to sculpture and painting. His work is often an amalgamation of these processes, taking inspiration in instances when these techniques converge.

In his most recent body of work, Otis explored the city, working to capture the frenetic pace of modern life through a series of etchings and sculpture. This culminated in a duo show in Salzburg at The Traklhaus Gallery in 2025. At the heart of his work is always an observation and a questioning of our current and ever-changing relationship with the world around us.

Website

http://www.otisblease.com

Exhibitions

Exhibitions
2025 Bridge I Brücke (with Hannah Tilson), kura-t kunstraum traklhaus, Salzburg (AT).
2024 Drakes x Wondering People Drakes Saville Row, London.
2021 Reveille, The Violet Hour, London. Factory Exhibition, Thorpe Stavri, London.
Voices in Drawing, Fen Ditton Gallery, Cambridge (UK).
Drawing Year 2019–20 End of Year Show, The Royal Drawing School, London.
Open Studios, SPACE, London.
Best of The Drawing Year 2019–20, Christies, London.
2020 Grays Wharf Summer Show: Tenants and friends of Grays Wharf, Grays Wharf, Penryn (UK). 2018 Con-form, Drawing and Printmaking BA Degree show, Arnolfini, Bristol (UK).
2017 Fortress, Peoples Republic of Stokes Croft, Bristol.
2016 In Residence, Jamaica Street Studios, Bristol.