Ask Scandinavia had the pleasure to have a chat with Rosanna Morris, a printmaker located in the UK, about her story and the ins and outs of her brand.
What’s the story behind your printmaking business?
I began printmaking when I was 19, I wanted to make my drawings larger and was incredibly inspired by wheat paste artists and printmakers I'd learnt about in New York and Mexico. My first prints were between one and two meters high and mainly featured farmers and animals, which were then wheat pasted around the city.
What did you do before?
For me there wasn't really a before, I have been fully focused on creating art since I was very young, when at high school I took all my art qualifications very early and was generally left to my own devices, missing classes for the more academic subjects in order to sit and draw in the art department.
One of the leading themes of your work is agriculture; what sparked your interest in the subject?
I think growing up in a very urban environment on a council estate, I have always looked towards the countryside as some sort of ideal, something to reach for. I used to visit my grandmother who lived next to a woodland, surrounded by farmland and I found her life very inspiring. I have also always been very interested in where food comes from, how it's produced and what it means for the land. I guess that also comes from being really poor when we were young and food being pretty scarce, it all links up in some way.
Your art has clear political and environmentalist undertones to it. In what ways have those aspects shaped your message?
I guess for me art has always been a vehicle for communicating political ideas. Or at least, i'm only interested in art which is political. I like things to be useful, and useless art is probably the worst in my opinion.
You are the only one working on the prints, and you’re a parent as well. How do you manage to balance it all?
It's incredibly tricky, my partner also runs his own business, so together there is always a struggle for time and rest, but it's fulfilling in such a brilliant way I don't think I could do anything else. I'm grateful that I have an incredibly supportive and understanding audience, I don’t hide the fact I'm a parent and I just have to hope people understand when I can't work on amazon style time frames.
What, or who inspires your creativity?
I'm so inspired by Mexican printmakers, political printmakers who take the creation of publicising media and positive propaganda into their own hands. I'm also inspired by land workers and farmers, modern day peasants who do a very hard job whilst managing to sustain and heal the earth.
