Hil Barnes
“The etching process I use is not only extremely time consuming but requires tools, chemicals and machinery specific to this form of printmaking. Having limited space and resources, I access these, and a key chemical; nitric acid, in the workshop of the Working Men's College in Camden.
To produce one print takes days or weeks. The separate stages, from preparing and scribing the image into the prepared ground, etching the plate in acid, applying the aquatint surface, fine-tuning with varnish while dipping between layers in acid to create tone, burnishing, endlessly proofing and repeating until finally reaching a place where the plate can be considered ready to print, takes time. For me, every step is a pleasure.”
- Hil Barnes
Hil Barnes at work
Hil Barnes completed a Masters degree in Printmaking at Middlesex University in 2020. She primarily works with etching, preferring monochromatic prints and stark images to colour, and is influenced by the master engravers, both historical and contemporary. Her obsession is with process.
Barnes’ work is informed both by her interest in architecture and her background in photography, as well as her involvement in housing campaigns and community activism, from the 1970s to the present time. Her series Regeneration explores the destruction of serviceable buildings, while Time the Devourer presents a landscape of the changing city; modern offices towering above ancient churches and pockets of housing.
Barnes’ work has also delved into the subject of her family, through the irreverent and revealing series Siblings and The Family, and through her printmaking she has also found a way of bringing her ancestors back to life, with the help of family albums.
While she has a very specific method of working, Barnes prefers to focus on different ‘subjects’ as they present themselves, with no overarching theme. Currently she is attracted to tractors.
‘Metamorphosis’
Etching and aquatint on Somerset paper,
31 x 38cm,
Edition of 20,
2022.