Ickworth Exhibition 2025 - Spotlight on Printing

This summer, Suffolk Craft Society returns to the magnificent Ickworth Estate for a major exhibition celebrating contemporary craft. Coinciding with the start of Heritage Week, the exhibition responds to the theme ‘Ickworth on the World Stage’, and features many disciplines. Today we're focusing on the exceptional printmakers that will be joining us there. 

 

Marta Dyer-Smith discovered her passion for printmaking nearly a decade ago at Gainsborough’s House. With a background in IT, Marta brings a spirit of experimentation and openness to her practice, developing her own techniques in collagraphy, monoprint, dry point, and relief printing. Known for sharing her process with a global community of fellow artists through YouTube and Instagram, Marta creates abstract landscapes assembled from outdoor sketches, capturing the essence of nature in all weather. 

 

Sally Freer, a former Vice Chair and now Honorary Member of the Society, takes inspiration from the Suffolk and Essex countryside. Her monoprints—based on memory or watercolour studies—depict winding paths, boats stranded on the shore, and hidden churches among hedgerows and fields. Using screen and relief printing techniques, Sally explores how colour and patterned print marks can dramatically shift the tone and mood of an image. 

 

Greta Hansen, trained at Ipswich Art School, Central Saint Martins, and London University, draws lifelong inspiration from the Suffolk landscape. After years of teaching art and pottery, she returned to her roots and developed her printmaking through Gainsborough’s House Print Workshop. Greta now works primarily in collagraphs and woodcuts using the reduction method, often printing from dark to light to achieve striking and sometimes unexpected results. 

 

Helen Maxfield, working from her studio near Needham Market, produces limited edition linocuts inspired by sketching trips along the Suffolk coast and countryside. Her designs begin as observational studies and evolve through the printmaking process to celebrate both the natural world and the bold, tactile beauty of linocut technique. 

 

This celebration of craftsmanship coincides with the start of Heritage Week, reflecting the Society’s ongoing commitment to skill, sustainability, and the creation of contemporary heirlooms. The exhibition offers visitors a unique opportunity to explore the work of makers who bring history, creativity, and tradition into conversation with the present day. 

 

More information here >>