Viljandi UNESCO City of Craft and Folk Arts
Viljandi, in Southern Estonia, is a UNESCO City of Craft. Viljandi Heritage Festival 2024, is part of Tartu’s European Capital of Culture programme. The Heritage Festival and UNESCO City of Craft and Folk Art designation work as improvers; the festival discusses how folklore and traditional knowledge can help find sustainable solutions to economic and environmental problems, and visitors get to learn craft skills themselves. This was a great platform for Perth Print Process as it was an opportunity to show how craft skills can be inspired by our heritage but also use cutting-edge technologies, exemplifying that there are endless possibilities within craft to support sustainable futures.
Perth Print Process Exhibition
Marliese Richmond, local printmaker (Three Bears Prints), was commissioned to create a new work using the Perth Art Gallery collections as inspiration and the technology available in Perth Ideas Centre for research and development of the work.
When Marliese was invited to take part in this exhibition, she was asked to use the collections of Perth Art Gallery as a starting point. She knew that she wanted to incorporate her love of traditional printmaking. She asked to see the poster collection at the museum and used a Scottish War Savings poster featuring a knight on horseback as her initial prompt. She was drawn to this design as it featured the typical CMYK colours as well as standard techniques such as stipple pointing and line drawing. She decided that she would like to create a set of designs based on the primary colours and black. However, as she loves depicting the natural world, she decided to use the taxidermy collection as her subject matter. On exploring the collections, she decided to focus on three different birds.
Marliese Richmond is a printmaker living in Perth, Scotland. She has been making linocut artwork since her 20s, which she prints up on her heritage printing press which is well over 100 years old. She is very much inspired by the natural world and is fortunate enough to live close to beautiful countryside, which she depicts in her artwork. She transforms what she creates into fabrics and wallpapers.
Perth Ideas Centre is a makerspace and business incubator located in the Perth Creative Exchange. Created by Perth & Kinross Council, the centre is a business incubator which aims to support business development through providing access to digital technology which would be inaccessible to small businesses.