Norfolk printmaker Amelia Bowman tells us how the county's coast and countryside inspires her colourful homewares
Art and creativity are in the blood for Amelia Bowman. Her mum is a sculptor, her grandmother and great-grandmother were both artists – and her daughter is following in her footsteps.
“My daughter is only really interested in being creative, she loses interest in toys very quickly and just goes back to her craft supply, so it’s carrying on down the female line,” she says.
Amelia creates gorgeous, cheerful homewares, prints and tote bags inspired by Norfolk and nature: seaside scenes such as the famous stripey Wells beach huts, the colourful canopies of the stalls on Norwich Market, the Broads and flora and fauna.
Her studio is a converted garage at her home in Wymondham where she creates her work using a technique called collagraph. Her print press is a converted mangle, bought for £20.
“I’ve always loved just tinkering with things, and I’ve always been a bit Heath Robinson and I thought, well, a mangle looks like the same kind of thing really as a print press so maybe I’ll just buy an old mangle and convert it and make it into one," she says.
It took nine months, but gave her a press for a tenth of the cost of an off-the-shelf model. “And it’s still going today. It’s a bit wonky, it’s not particularly well behaved, but we muddle along,” she says.
Throughout her GCSEs and A levels Amelia focused on painting and sculpting and she studied textiles at Norwich Art School. “At that point in time I was creating very colourful jewellery, with dyed and manipulated plastic, so I was on the edge of textiles,” she says.
“After I graduated and was selling it, I realised quite quickly that the bit I was enjoying was the design process and the prototypes and not making the stock. And that’s when I started to move into freelance illustration.”
Amelia went to work in a high school's art department and she discovered collagraph when they took pupils to City College Norwich to learn about different types of printmaking. Collagraph is an intaglio form of printmaking - the opposite of the relief form of printmaking, such as linocut.
“We got a print press at the high school soon after that and I used to get on quite well with the site team so they used to let me in at the weekends and I’d go in and use it,” says Amelia.
And she didn’t have to look far to find inspiration. “Norfolk’s amazing, isn’t it? It’s kind of like Cornwall, because it’s not on the way to anywhere and there’s something special about that, I think. It seems to be a haven for artists and full of really inspiring vistas – and wherever you get coastline, you’re always going to get artists and people feeling inspired.
“I love it, I grew up in the middle of nowhere in Barnham Broom – our nearest neighbours were half a mile down the road and we were surrounded by fields.
“And the coast has always been part of my life – my father is a Cornishman and at the same time these trips to City College were happening my parents had a holiday home on the coast in Suffolk and I was spending quite a lot of time sketching on the beach and then those sketches got made into collagraph plates.”
ameliabowman.co.uk
