Artist Spotlight: Maggie Thompson and Susan Wright

Maggie Thompson

I am a Yorkshire-based artist working primarily in the field of printmaking. My current practice focusses on the exploration of “Place” which I have currently been exploring through themes of absence, transience and fragility and through that to capture its history, spirit and a “sense of place.” My work fluctuates between figuration and abstraction, almost finding its own semi abstraction, and in that way see it to be similar to the liminal space of memory.

More often than not my work starts with photographic images these can be from a variety of sources and I’ve taken as a starting point my own photographs, Google Street view screen captures, while the work exhibited at Salford Art Gallery began with archive photographs of a specific part of the city

I will work with an idea by making a series of prints and discovering something about it through the process of making. The method by which I work and the meaning I am trying to create are interconnected so that the way I make the plates is informed by the ideas behind the work. To this extent my printmaking is process-driven. I am most often drawn to techniques that allow chance and accident so that the result is not planned at the outset but arises organically out of the process.

Susan Wright

I am a printmaker based in Halifax, West Yorkshire. My work is based around the concept of time and how over time the impact of people and the environment affect objects, building and places. I make archaeological type investigations into the history of an object or place, sometimes challenging the accepted history by using unconventional processes of recording the marks and traces of the object’s journey through time. I use whatever print making technique I feel best reflects what I want the print to reveal, the process of creating a print leads the way to the outcome of the work. The work at Salford Art Gallery epitomises this process as a range of printmaking techniques were used to create it. The focus was on a very small area of Greengate, Salford. I recorded the floors of one building using a frottage drawing techniques and transformed them into prints. These direct drawings captured the remaining hints and fragments of what had been left by the people who worked there. The prints themselves had a ethereal-like quality to them, some printed on Japanese tissue. Old maps from the Salford library supported the investigation, the constantly changing nature of this area, which I demonstrated by eroding drawings of maps on aluminium, added a different narrative to the original map when they were then made into prints. Direct observation, essential to any investigation, revealed the changing materials used in the pathways, tracks and roads in the area which allowed for another print making technique, photoetching, to be used.

2. Salford Museum’s full exhibition says the pieces are “looking at how places change over time and how it is fragile”. How is this idea reflected in your art?

The title and the description of the exhibition were chosen after the four artists brought together by the gallery had met and the detail of the work to be exhibited was becoming more concrete (see the response to question 3 below). It was therefore chosen as the best fit for the 4 artists involved and our different practices. For my part, the main way that this is reflected in the work shown is in the materials I used as the installation piece ( “The invention of memory” ) which is printed on very thin tissue paper and hung in a space in such a way as it is able to move with the slightest breeze in the gallery. All the prints were based on historic photos and therefore, the way that the area had changed over time, is the core of the work I produced.

(Susan) Also there is an ethereal quality to all the work in the exhibition, thin fragile materials were used by us all. There is a feeling of that they are insubstantial, easily damaged. Like the constant changes in the area of Salford, nothing remains the same. As the demands of the people change, the area adapts to it, but we can still see the fragments of what was there before.

3. What inspired you to create the pieces?

The first time that Sue and I met was when we were both undertaking MA’s in Fine Art at different institutions, Sue in Leeds and me at Manchester school of Art. We attended a drawing symposium which was held at artist’s studios in an industrial building in the Greengate area of Salford. Part of the day was spend engaging with the building we were in, and when we returned to the group for the discussion at the end discovered that we had produced very similar work as we’d both been fascinated by the old stone floor which was found within a 1950’s industrial shed and clearly related to an earlier building on the site.

When I completed my MA I ended up taking a studio in a building in Halifax where Sue had had a studio for a number of years and for probably 8 years we often tried to work out what to do with the drawings from that day as we recognised they were a starting point for something- but it took us quite a few years to work out what.

In 2023 we decided to submit a proposal to Salford Art Gallery for an exhibition looking at the Greengate area of Salford which is the old medieval core of the city ( it has a market charter dating from the 13^th century) but is now the location of huge glass and steel sky scrapers. Later that summer the proposal was accepted, but the gallery wanted to bring our work together with that of 2 other artists ( Lizzie King and Naomi Kendrick) who were also working with ideas of fragility and time.

We spent a lot of time exploring the area I was very taken by the old photographs held in the local history museum and decided to use aspects of these as the core of the work I made.

The result was a body of work which I think of as “Manufactured landscape” , a series of more than 40 individual prints which showed the medieval timber-framed buildings that still lined Greengate’s main roads until the nineteenth century , and images of the people who used to live there when it became a place of factories and pubs and workers housing; a landscape of manufacturing.

(Susan) It was the original drawing that we had made which started off the process for me. Then I saw the maps in the library, maps always fascinate me and the changes that have occurred in such a small area I felt needed to be recorded in some way. I think I was also inspired by the fact that this area was included in my walk from the railway station to a print workshop where I was doing a course. In the three years that I was doing that weekly walk, the huge number of changes that I saw to the buildings and roads was astonishing.

4. What were the methods and processes of your pieces? Did anything change along the way?

The way I made the prints is through a process called photo lithography. It’s quite a different way for me to work because there’s very little chance in the process, and most of the work is done on a laptop manipulating the photos I have taken to produce the image that will be used on the printing plate. I therefore introduced the element of chance in the way I photographed the original archive photos I worked from.

I chose to use photo lithography because I always feel that there’s something almost magical about lithographic processes which are based on the principle of oil and water not mixing. I was aware that many of the archive images were really old, and at the time they were taken photography itself must have seemed magical to the people in the pictures.

A lot changed along the way, the more we found out about Greengate the more it interested us. For my part it wasn’t until really late in the making process that I understood what I wanted to show and how I wanted it to look, and that influenced the images I selected which were in the main, only small sections of the original historic photograph. I wanted to show something of the people who had lived there, as the demographics of the area now are very different from the way it was in the past when it was home to large multi generational families and factory workers, and to show the old buildings which it’s almost impossible to imagine standing n the sites of today’s skyscrapers.

(Susan) I knew I wanted to use the original drawings in some way, though I wasn’t sure how, I also used photolithography to make prints with these drawings. I knew I wanted to make other work with the maps, this did change a lot, I tried 3D modelling, collagraph processes and even when I was eroding the aluminium plates I really wasn’t sure what the outcome would be. I like elements of chance in the process and in determining the final product. The randomness is like the life on the streets of Salford, not knowing what will happen next!

5. How does printmaking as a medium enhance the pieces?

I find this a very difficult question to answer. Printmaking is the core of my practice, I’m not sure whether it does enhance the idea behind the work any more than any other method of working would, it’s simply the one that makes the most sense to me because it enables me to tie together the process by which the work is made and something of the idea behind work. It’s just the way that I work through an idea and the fact that it is, in general, quite a slow way of working is beneficial to me so that I can process the idea.

I find it easier to explain what it is about printmaking that makes it a good way for me to work:

I am drawn to the way that printmaking brings together opposites. In most cases (but not in photo lithography) it’s what is absent from the plate which is made visible by the process of printing. It allows me to make marks that I can’t by any other means. It slows me down because the process of making the plate is quite separate from that of printing it, and in most cases (but not in photo lithography) a plate can be printed in so many different ways and could take on many different forms even though the matrix is constant. Because the image on the plate is the reverse of the print it produces, it enables one to see the print very differently from the plate which is so familiar, and this can often bring new insights because I feel a distance from it through its strangeness. In most cases a print is made on damp paper and it has to be put into a paper press to dry flat for about a week at least, so there’s a second opportunity to see it anew as there is a distance in time from the making to seeing it again. There’s also something about the final piece which is produced being mediated by a press that appeals to me.

( Susan)

As Maggie said, this is a difficult question. I have always made work which had some element which was out of my control. The type of prints I make are often out of my control, the results can surprise me in good ways and in not so good ways. That sounds the opposite to what many printmakers would do, they control the process carefully and aim to create editions of the same print. By not making editioned prints I can use a much greater range of materials, including one off elements and techniques that cannot be reliably repeated. I think that without that element of experimentation, success and failures, the work would be very different,

6. How did you both approach the space?

The gallery space is big, and there are 4 of us in the exhibition with differing needs in terms of how our work would best be shown. It wasn’t until quite late on that I knew I wanted the main piece I made to be an installation, and I can’t honestly say whether the idea or seeing the space came first. But once I knew what I was making it was quite obvious to the person curating the exhibition where ‘The invention of memory’ needed to go.

(Susan) Orginaly, I thought I would be making wall based and 3D work so I was always considering the floor as well as the walls. Once I had dismissed the idea of floor based work I knew I had ten extended prints. Everything else fitted around them. It’s a big space, but once it was decided by the groups which spaces we would each have it was easier to understand where each piece would go, knowing the actual space helped to narrow down my choice of what I would exhibit

7. Did the final pieces and exhibitions turn out as you expected?

I don’t think I had an expectation of how it would look. When it came to installing the individual elements that made up “ The invention of memory “ the space dictated the heights and positions and the pieces chosen so it was quite an iterative process. I was very grateful to Dave the gallery technician for hanging the pieces so wonderfully, and also incredibly grateful that it wasn’t me trying to get them evenly spaced and level.

(Susan) It was more or less how I had imagined it to be, but as Maggie says, the curator really helped in the final decision about what would go where. The overall exhibition looked much better than I had imagined, I think the four artists and their work worked really well together

8. How do these pieces relate to your previous works?

In many ways the work for this exhibition was quite different from the way I normally work as there was far less chance in what was created and the ‘work’ happened in my laptop rather than using my hands to make a plate.

The way there is consistency are however numerous. The process was dictated by the idea behind the work, I picked up on the way that early photography felt like magic, and there;s still that feeling for me with lithographic processes

The fact that I was working with photographs rather than the place itself is also typical of my practice, no matter how many times I visit a place its always the photographs that are the inspiration The prints I made are quite enigmatic, which is something I generally try to achieve in the work I make. I want the viewer not to see something which isn’t necessarily what I saw, to place their own interpretation on them and find their own meaning.

And there is a consistency that I’ve only recently stated to recognise:- that I’ve been hanging things in spaces since the early days of my Creative Practice BA.

(Susan) I use found objects a lot in my work. I enjoy the stories that they tell about the past and the possible stories that they could tell about us to future observers. I don’t always go with the accepted narrative about an object or a place. I like to challenge what I am seeing. So I also challenge traditional printmaking techniques by experimenting with how I produce printing plates, how the prints are printed and what they might be printed on. I prefer to let the concept, the object and the process determine which printmaking method I might use. The results are prints which hold a different sort of temporal record, a changed account offering a challenge to the accepted story, questioning if we are seeing the past or a possible future.Many of my prints are unique, or in very small editions of two or three. This makes a lot of my work more like one off Fine Art pieces, so I would always say that I am a Fine artist who is currently using print.

9. How has working together as artists impacted your works?

I like working with Sue. We seem to work with lots of similar themes, and we talk about our work quite a lot. I often send her a Whatsapp message and picture of what I’ve been working on and that’s the beginning of a discussion about what we’re doing and where there is cross over etc. It’s great to have somebody who you can go to who will be honest about what you’ve produced, and often the process of discussing the other person’s work makes you see new things in your own. On a practical level it’s also good because we both have family commitments that can keep us busy, and we both understand that and can cover for each other when we need to.

It’s good to have somebody to spur you on, because the whole process of being an artist can be quite isolating otherwise and it’s hard to be totally self motivated all the time.

(Susan) I definitely agree with everything Maggie has said and I’ll add that making prints or any kind of art, you often need a bit of a kickstart and Maggie is very good at doing that!

10. What makes “time” such an important theme for art and artists?

Time has always been an important theme in art because it touches something universal and inescapable about human existence. In this case which focusses on the Greengate area of Salford it touches upon ideas of mortality and impermanence.

I see the whole series as being like a message from the past, a glimpse into a now forgotten space and the fleeting lives that took place there. They are a memento mori, and hopefully an opportunity to visit ordinary lives and spaces during a moment frozen in time. They are a token of absence that shows what has been lost and replaced.

I wanted them to highlight the transience and impermanence of this historic area which is all but lost underneath the modern development , for them to be something of a collective memory. But I am aware that they are not my memories of that place which I first encountered in the 1980s and which was already very different to the places I have shown and also to the place one sees today. And thus art can be used to show how memory shifts with time—how we reinterpret the past depending on our experience of the present.

Time as a theme allows one to explore change and transformation, the timelessness of Greengate in the past where timber framed medieval buildings survived for hundreds of years, the old street pattern which was still visible with the more recent development but which are now being lost, and the historic land uses which were suggested by the names of the roads. Art allows us to explore how time feels—its slowness, and current acceleration as the past is rapidly swept away.

(Susan) Time is what so much art is about. Even on the most practical level it takes time to create art, time to think about what you are going to do. You constantly challenge why you are working in a particular way, time allows us to answer these questions or at least consider them. For printmakers there is an exquisite period of time between making the plate and printing it, you don’t know what it will be like, that moment of delay before lifting the paper up to see the new print. It’s a period of time which I sometimes postpone for longer. You don’t get that with many other ways of working.

Time is not linear, it goes back and forward to past and present and future and in different directions as it is dong so. The artis can capture any moment in time, and hold it for a long time on a canvas, paper ceramic of whatever medium they chose. That is why its so attractive, it is fluid and offers so many possibilities. If you move through time it doesn’t have to be real or true, time is abstract. It takes time to stop and consider a piece of art.

Empowering local artists through SCAF’s platform is part of our misson to continue nurturing vibrant creative communities. We hope these insights have been an enjoyable read that broadens your perspective on the artistic processes of two wonderful artists. Be sure to check out their websites and socials below, and also that of the Salford Museum and Art Gallery - in which the artists group show is on view until the 22nd of December this year!

Susan Wright

https://suegrantwright.com/

Instagram: Suegrantwright2 Facebook: suewright

Maggie Thompson

https://www.maggiethompsonprintmaker.com/

Instagram: maggiethompsonprintmaker

https://salfordmuseum.com/event/fragments24/

On display in the East Wing from 22 March to 21 December 2025