About

Louise Weir is an artist, illustrator and lecturer on the Illustration course at Southampton Solent University.

She grew up in a small hamlet in the North West of England called Hatton in the only local pub the  “Hatton Arms”. The rural landscape and the large and rich variety of  “locals” that inhabited her childhood have had a profound effect on Louise’s work and she has a fascination with narrative that explores these areas.

She currently  lives in Walthamstow and works in her studio next to London Fields in the East End of London.

This new and recent work  is an investigative journey of memory, identity and loss informed by Dickens’ novel “Great Expectations” which examines very similar themes. Exploring the text helped Louise examine her own personal history and emotional landscape, creating a dialogue between the text, isolated memories and specific events at the time of making.

Louise has repeatedly visited locations from Dickens’ novel and those featured in her own poetry, much of which draws on memories of real characters and places around her childhood home. Elements fragment, reappear and echo to create a mysterious place where the stories and memories overlap, meet and converse.

The dialogue between past and present is reflected in Louise’s methodology, which brings together a breadth of traditional and digital processes.

This synthesis of the past and present is particularly evident in the association between digital print and letterpress text, the latter referencing the historical period of “Great Expectations” when letterpressing was the predominant  printing method in use

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