profile
Neil Bousfield creates reduction and multi-block engravings with subtle overlays of printed colour, tone and pattern. He lives and works on the North Norfolk coast where he makes engravings concerned with the local fragile landscape near to his home under threat of sea incursion.
The work considers how the sea connects coastal places around the world and questions sense of place, attachment to place, and value of place. It is about lost landscapes and places you can no longer go back to, and how place can be changed emotionally and physically
Living on the coast allows him to make work that aims to raise questions about communities and people who invest in places which will be lost to sea-level rise. With increasing concern about climate change, the transitional space between the land and the sea has a fragile mutability as the shore acts as a barometer of even greater change.
Bousfield is a British printmaker and master of relief engraving. He uses innovative materials and processes within the traditional method of wood engraving, experimenting with synthetic and natural blocks to suit his purpose: the use of new materials, colour and the reduction process all seem to lie on the edge of the tradition of wood engraving.
Born in Middlesbrough, Bousfield grew up in Marske on the North Yorkshire coast. He gained his MA at the University of the West of England, Bristol. Previously he studied at Cleveland College of Art & Design, West Surrey College of Art & Design, and Teesside University. Bousfield is an elected member of The Society of Wood Engravers and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers.
Work is held within public collections including the National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; MMU Special Collections, Manchester; Pallant House Gallery, Chichester; Ohio State University Libraries, USA; The Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) Beijing Shi; and the Jiangsu Art Museum, Nanjing, China. Work is also held in private collections in Australia, France, USA, Canada and the UK