Made in Britain
We visit the Cornish countryside, where Lou Tonkin creates intricately detailed art prints
Longwalks through the countryside are as much a part of Lou Tonkin’s making process as the hours she spends at work in the studio. Her inspiration comes almost entirely from her local environment – the coast and countryside of south Cornwall, rich in all kinds of plants, birds and wildlife. ‘The hedgerows are my main source of inspiration,’ Lou says. ‘I draw a lot in my sketch book, but generally a design is already formed in my mind when I go for a walk. It spins about in my head as I go along, and once it is finely tuned I’ll return home.’
Lou’s studio is a calm and light-filled space in her garden, the walls lined with past prints, jostling for space with shelves full of the neatly arranged products that are made from her designs by local producers. At a desk in the corner, a bookcase is crammed with reference books, while drying lines criss-cross the room above the central printing table. The studio has an otherworldly atmosphere, which belies its less-than-glamorous origins as a garage, built in 1938 to house the village’s single-decker bus. Lou describes the space as having developed organically. ‘My studio is set out for practicalities rather than aesthetics, but it just happens that the tools I use are beautiful in themselves,’ she says. ‘I like sticking things up onto the walls, and referring back to my old prints; I like having books easily accessible on my shelves, because I do look things up. I study the background, the folklore and the botany, which adds to the depth of my work.’
Drawing has always come naturally to Lou, who grew up in Cornwall and studied illustration at Falmouth University. She left in 2003 and set up as self-employed the following year – by now with a baby and a toddler to fit her work around. Unable to find clothes she wanted to wear, she started to make her own and then developed a small business selling them. ‘But it was the creative process – a kind of appliqué work – that was more interesting to me than the way the clothes fitted,’ she says. ‘I started to sell framed art images, although I continued to dabble in printing, which I’d first learnt to love when I was at school.’
In 2014, Lou was spotted by the team at the Lost Gardens of Heligan and invited to be their artist-inresidence. She spent three years working in their summerhouse, demonstrating and sometimes running workshops, making and selling limitededition printed artworks and textile products, and designing commercially printed teatowels and other homeware items. ‘Those years allowed me to stretch myself as an artist in a nurturing environment where I had all the things that inspired me outside my door,’ she says. ‘It taught me to journal for work, so that I could record the
changes through the gardens on a daily basis. It also taught me commercial processes, so selling my own products was a natural progression.’
Lou continued to work with textiles for a while, but then decided to concentrate on print. By this stage a single mother of three children, she was very conscious that everything she made had to be commercially viable. ‘In the beginning I never did a print that wasn’t in a composition that I could turn into something else,’ she explains. ‘I’ve been very cautious about expanding, and only produced a product to sell when I’m aware that the print itself has been successful.’
The technique of block-printing is one that hasn’t changed for centuries, and Lou appreciates its basic, manual processes. ‘It’s a real joy to get ink on your fingers – I love making things with hand tools,’ she says. Most designs are printed in reverse, so she will reverse the drawing using tracing paper or carbon paper and then work back-to-front. ‘Otherwise, I’ll draw directly onto the block.
I carve it with a lino cutter, working quite quickly, and organically changing my design as I’m going. Then I roll the lino with ink, press the block onto paper or fabric, and either hand-burnish it or put it through my printing press.’ She then peels the paper away and hangs the prints up to dry.
Initially selling almost entirely through craft fairs and to commission, Lou has built up her business steadily, enlarging her product base to include teatowels, mugs, aprons, cushion covers, oven gloves and, most recently, napkins. As far as possible everything is ethical, sustainable and made in Cornwall or at least the UK.
More recently, she has found that her limitededition art prints, depicting plants, flowers, birds and animals – from wrens, swallows, otters and hares to all kinds of hedgerow flowers and leaves – have become more dominant in terms of sales, although her printed textiles are ever-popular.
‘My designs are not so much about colour, but more about the marks and the way the different elements all fit together,’ she says. ‘I’d like to think that the prints I create show movement as much as correct detail. It’s not about replicating something realistically; it’s an expression of character.’
With the advent of social media, Lou has built up such a following that she now sells only through her website, opening her shop once a month so that she can cap sales to the amount that she is comfortably able to create while combining her other roles as a mother and an artist. ‘In the first month I tried it, the shop was open for ten days until everything sold out; the second month two hours 45 minutes, and this month it was open for 22 minutes. I’m really grateful to the very lovely community we have online,’ she says.
‘What has worked well for me since I started out has just been being myself, forging my own path. The result is something that is truer to who I am, which I hope comes through in my work.’
For more details about Lou’s work or to buy her products visit loutonkin.com