Imagined Memories

  • (b. 1989, China) is a multi-disciplinary printmaking artist based in Shanghai, China, and Bristol, UK.

    She graduated from the University of Arts London in 2016 and was honoured with the RE Gwen May Recent Graduate Award by the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers. 2017 following her return to China, Hammer established the “Wait and Roll Printmaking Studio" in Shanghai.

    In 2023, she completed her Multi-Disciplinary Printmaking MA at UWE Bristol. She was recently honoured with the Creativity Award from The Royal West of England Academy and the Bainbridge Print Prize from the Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair.

  • (b. 1988, Norway) is an artist and printmaker.

    In 2019 she received her MFA from the Oslo National Academy of Fine Arts. That same year, she was the recipient of the KoMask European Masters Printmaking Award in Antwerp.

    Referring to her own Norwegian-Singaporean family background, themes of migration and historical trade routes have long formed the basis of Liberg's practice. She is particularly interested in the loss of memory and cultural understanding that occurs between generations as a result of migration and diaspora, and how personal family histories can represent fragments of larger global narratives of trade, colonialism and women's roles.

    Liberg works with traditional graphic techniques such as lithography, etching, copper engraving and mezzotint.

Opening

8th February

Both the Norwegian-Singaporean artist Cathrine Alice Liberg and the Chinese artist Chenxi Chen (aka Hammer) employ etching as their primary technique for crafting dreamlike graphic works.

Hammer seeks to reconstruct memories from collective experiences, capturing scenarios and moments that most of us have encountered in some form: a drowsy, long journey by train or bus, or a seemingly perpetual escalator rising in the middle of nowhere. Much like the way we process memories in our minds, photos and images are manipulated and abstracted on the metal plates.

Cathrine, who recently returned from an adventurous trip to Svalbard, where she attended a thirteen-week-long residency, brought back works imbued with the weight of Arctic exploration history. As she noted in her weekly blog reporting from the last depot of human civilisation: It was impossible to come to Svalbard and not be influenced in some way. The series of prints she produced there stands out remarkably from her ongoing exploration of her own diasporic family background.

Both artists were nominated for The Queen Sonja Print Award in 2022.