MEMORIES

Thumbprint Collective

6 September - 26 October 2025
Cathleen Edkins Gallery

Celebrating 30 years of printmaking, Thumbprint Collective presents Memories, an exhibition acknowledging the long history of the group while the artists take their own deep dives into personal memories and reflections.

Printmaking is all about memory, recording the mark of the maker and playing it back in forensic detail. The scratch, the shadow or emboss is recorded on a plate and the evidence played back on printer’s paper– caught forever in that moment of truth.

This exhibition is about relationships to the past, whether they be people, places or items. Finding that poetic intersection between the process of printmaking and the recording and representing of the past on paper, the artists take time to dig a space around a chosen memory, to flesh it out, dress it up – or down – and ask questions about how a particular time or moment was shaped and how it shaped them.

Always exploring and inventing, the Thumbprint Collective artists use techniques including woodcut, etching, monotype, collagraph and cyanotype to retrace steps in time and put a face to the past.

Thumbprint Collective members: Ruth Schubert, Anne Miles, Julie Bignell, Diana Wiseman, Libby Altschwager, Stephanie Yoannidis, Sue Shaw, Sally O’Connor, Trudy Tandberg, Rachael Ashman, Marianne Tucker, Sharn Lucas, Sue Ivanovic, Jennie Matthews, Anne Headlam, Rob Clisdell.

Image: Thumbprint Collective member, Trudy Tandberg in action.