‘31 Years 31 Prints’
Peter Dover - A Retrospective
Peter Dover MA (RCA), ARE
An Ongoing Enquiry, 31 years Printmaking 1980 - 2012
Over the last thirty one years, Peter Dover has been primarily concerned with landscape and the environment, both
natural and manmade. A geological fascination with landscape, its erosion and industrial transformative processes
translated through reductive and additive print techniques is evident throughout Dover’s oeuvre. In particular he
continues to explore land at the margins of water as well as examining the margins between nature and humanity,
ensuring a consistency that is underpinned with enquiry and experimentation.
This retrospective exhibition at the Cornerstone Gallery will chart this journey beginning at Wirral College of Art in 1980
where he discovered silkscreen printing; the start of what he describes as a “charmed” art education. He continued on
to Leeds Polytechnic (now Leeds Metropolitan University) studying under Norman Webster and Phil Redmond, choosing
to specialise in aquatint, collography, bookbinding and silkscreen. Taking two years out of education to taste life as a
professional artist he joined the West Yorkshire Print Workshop in Mirfield, West Yorkshire, established by Nick Wilson,
another Leeds alumnus and currently better known as the managing director of Pink Pig paper. He also established a
long teaching career and has since taught at KIAD, Canterbury, Leeds, Lorient (France) and Sunderland amongst other
institutions. He is currently Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Liverpool Hope.
1986 saw a move to study at the Royal College of Art, London under Professor Alistair Grant. Alan Smith tutored him in
advanced intaglio and collographic processes and he developed large scale relief printing techniques that ultimately
dispensed with the need for complicated and heavy presses on leaving the well-equipped studios after graduation. One
example of this process can be seen in Anne Westley’s book ‘Relief Printing’ (A & C Black 2001, ISBN 0-7136-7255-2).
This immersion in process has informed his entire arts practice ever since. He has exhibited widely (including the US,
Canada, Germany, Estonia, Latvia, Spain and France) and won several awards over the years including the Printmaking
Today award at the 1994 FBA Print Exhibition and two awards in 1995 at the Tallinn International Print Triennale. He
was elected ARE in 1995. His work is held in several collections including the Tate Gallery, (Between Two Rivers,
Artists book), The London, Liverpool Women’s and St. Thomas’s Hospitals, Estonia National Art Museum, Herbert Read
Library, KIAD, and Plymouth Art Gallery. He has curated several exhibitions most notably a group exhibition of over 100
British artists’ books at the Gallery of Foreign Arts, Riga, Latvia in 1999.
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An early print from 1980 depicts at its centre the artist as drummer. Marking out another long standing interest, Dover
has been involved in music since 1975 with various musicians including Patrik Fitzgerald and the Brodsky Quartet. He
also builds and restores drums. He is currently working with contemporary post punk jazz quartet, C-City, playing
original jazz rooted instrumental music, and Alt Rock band TMI (www.myspace.com/ccityjazz).
In his visual practice, Dover engages with landscape as both subject and substance. From selecting sections of the
landscape and designating it Art – the SAD sites (Sites of Art Designate) – to incorporating elements of the environment,
the works are frequently site specific with their distinctive use of sand, driftwood and other found objects. He has
produced work as a result of travels to Brittany and Andalucía, but is constantly drawn back to the Wirral peninsula and
the rivers Dee and Mersey, the sources of not only prints but also paintings, artist books and, latterly, sound pieces. A
native of New Brighton, with a family background of work in the shipyards, Dover has a deep personal connection with
his subject matter.
Liverpool city centre too has played its part in the print works. A 1999 series looked at the Anglican and Catholic
Cathedrals, the former being depicted in one example as bold fragments of a stripped down but instantly identifiable
silhouette against the backdrop of an intensely blue sky. A fragment of the top of the large tower emerges from the
lower border of the print, leaving the viewer to complete the image in their own mind’s eye – thus the work draws the
spectator in. The interest in the landscape of human intervention has re-intensified over recent years with images and
sound and video recordings of inclement weather transforming and reconfiguring familiar landscapes, charting their
decline, decay and transformation. There is no nostalgia in these depictions but a more dispassionate reflection of the
process of degeneration and its visual consequences.
In his fascination with manmade and natural landscapes (and the relationship between the two) Dover explores a
familiar genre but in an unconventional way. A found object, a discarded fragment, the banal and abandoned are given
a new part to play in both constructed paintings and print. These contribute to the distinctive surfaces, produced with
meticulous craftsmanship, that characterise the works. Neither are the objects necessarily insignificant fragments, as
seen in Bicycle Diptych of 2007.
The environment is a recurring but not the sole theme. A move to a new house around the turn of the millennium saw
Dover turn his eye to the domestic, giving rise to a series of works featuring chairs and ladders removed from their
original context and isolated against a plain, anonymous background. These motionless works were exhibited at the
Curwen New Academy Gallery, London in 2003 in an exhibition entitled Silence. The Curwen Gallery has, incidentally,
generously supported Dover’s work since 1989.
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The craftsmanship in Dover’s work is remarkable, both from the point of view of his handling of his chosen media but
also in the physical construction of the pieces. He enjoys exploring different facets of printmaking processes,
expressing a fascination with the notion that the printing press, once at the forefront of the dissemination of information
has been superseded in that function and has assumed a different role; in his own work and in his pedagogical practice,
he seeks to ensure the contemporary relevance of a process that need not be relegated to history. In his own words, “it
is the language that is important, not the history of the machinery and the process by which it was made.” His
proficiency with traditional methods is matched by his eagerness to explore the challenge of new technologies.
Working with a digital textile printer has enabled him to produce large scale images on canvas and to combine
printmaking, photography and collage. These newer processes do not become ends in themselves – digital media
does not mean large scale for its own sake, as witnessed by the postcard sized Saw Horse of 2011 in which a workshop
saw horse has been reconfigured in a striking but not heavy handed visual pun. The uses of digital alongside traditional
processes illustrate his ongoing integration of the traditional with the highly contemporary. Moving beyond ink, metal
and paper to the incorporation of electronic media, light and natural processes combine to produce an eclectic approach
that does not privilege one media over another.
The past thirty one years have seen Peter Dover make a number of journeys in his work and at all times, the underlying
spirit of enquiry is apparent. The 2003 New Academy Gallery Silence exhibition took its title from the W.B. Yeats poem
After Long Silence and like Yeats, Dover casts a cold, but not callous, eye. This exhibition, an investigative journey
through reclamation and artistic practice informed by personal experience, will provide a compelling exhibition full of
surprises.
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Price List
‘Pool (Meanwood Park)’, 1981
Etching
NFS
‘Self Portrait’, 1982
Aquatint
NFS
‘Triptych’, 1989-2011
Relief Print
NFS
‘Broken Dreams, 1988
Aquatint
£175.00 unframed £210.00 framed
‘Keeping Time’, 1980
Silkscreen
£25.00 unframed (Giclee Print only)
‘After Matisse (tabac royal)’, 1983
Lithograph
NFS
‘Red and burn’, 1983
Relief Print
£275.00 unframed £320.00 framed
‘Etching aquatint (two plate)’, 1988
Etching and Aquatint
£175.00 unframed £210.00 framed
‘Blue Sun (EV)’, 1988
Relief Print
negotiate with artist
‘Landscape 2’, 1985
Collograph ink transfer
£175.00 unframed £210.00 framed
‘Lithograph Collage’, 1984
Lithograph
£200.00 unframed £235.00 framed
‘Architecture (large artist’s proof)’, 1985
Collograph drypoint
£275.00 unframed £325.00 framed
The Dance (Lorient)’, 1989
Relief Print
negotiate with artist
‘Landscape (large RCA)’, 1987
Collograph
£350.00 unframed £425.00 framed
‘Demonstration’, 1991
Relief Print
£225.00 unframed £265.00 framed
‘Another vastness 39.5 X 39.5’, 1995
Relief Print
£200.00 unframed £235 framed
‘Margins of the Sea’, 1992
Relief Print
£750.00 unframed £850.00 framed
‘Between Two Rivers’, 1991
Relief Print
£225.00 unframed £265.00 framed
‘Malaguena Noche’, 1993
Relief Print
£200.00 unframed £230.00 framed
‘Sunflower II’, 1986
Relief Print
£350.00 unframed £425.00 framed
‘Sunflower’, 1988
Relief Print
£350.00 unframed £425.00 framed
‘‘Beyond the Horizon’,1993
Relief Print
£200.00 unframed £230.00 framed
‘Cathedral 39.5 X 39.5’, 1996
Relief Monoprint
£250.00 unframed £300.00 framed
‘Rust’, 1993
Rust transfer print
£300.00 unframed £350.00 framed
‘Cathedral (Cathedral Church of
Christ in Liverpool)’, 1996
Relief Print
£300.00 unframed £350.00 framed
Opening Hours: 9am to 5pm Monday to Sunday
Tel: 0151 291 3997
E-mail: thecornerstonegallery.ac.uk
Web: www.hope.ac.uk/cornerstonegallery
Price List continued
‘Groyne (Revetment) small version’, 1998
Rust transfer print
£275.00 unframed £325.00 framed
‘Untitled 17.5 x12.5’, 2000
2 plate etching
£175.00 unframed £205.00 framed
‘Vessel (larger etching)’, 2001
Etching
£225.00 unframed £260.00 framed
‘Rectangle and light’, 2003
Relief print
£225.00 unframed £265.00 framed
‘The space between’, 2012
2 plate etching
£125.00 unframed £155.00 framed
‘Untitled ’, 2010
Etching & tape
£125.00 unframed £155.00 framed
‘Rock of Ages’, 2007
Etching & Drypoint
£110.00 unframed £140.00 framed
‘Untitled
Etching & Tape
£125.00 unframed £155.00 framed
Digital and Silkscreen
print, found object
and sand
£6000.00
I’, 2009
The River’, 2007
‘Conversation (Two Chairs) (diptych)’, 2002
Relief Print
£550.00 unframed (each)
£1000.00 unframed (pair)
£640.00 framed (each)
£1180.00 framed (pair)
Opening Hours: 9am to 5pm Monday to Sunday
Tel: 0151 291 3997
E-mail: thecornerstonegallery.ac.uk
Web: www.hope.ac.uk/cornerstonegallery