Roll Play

This collection of works centres on printmaking with the brayer, used here not as a fixed technique but as a means of enquiry. Students began by studying artists whose ways of seeing offered a starting point – not as models to replicate, but as threads to follow toward their own instincts and decisions.



Roll Play

Student exhibition: Art and Design with Tara Axford

"Roll Play, the title holds two meanings, and both matter. That's what this exhibition holds. Not perfection. Intention. The prints where play, purpose, and the roll of the brayer came together.

Each module of Art & Design introduced an artist, a way of seeing, a set of decisions made by someone working in a different time or place. The task was not to copy; it was to step into their thinking for a while. To ask: what drew them to this shape? Why these colours, this rhythm? And then to extract what interested you and follow it somewhere of your own. Extraction means pulling out the thread of interest and running it through your own hands, your own materials, your own instincts. For many students, this was the moment the course shifted. They stopped trying to reproduce what they admired and started using it as a springboard. The recording mattered too, because the act of stopping to look at what you've just made, before making the next thing, changes what you see. It turns printing into a practice.

It gives you something to return to when you're stuck, and something to push against when you're ready. And then there's repetition. Not mechanical repetition. The kind where you go back to the same technique with a different question. Where you reprint a background that didn't work, and it becomes the best surface you've made all week.

 

Many students experienced this: the moment when persistence stopped feeling like effort and started feeling like play. Play is the word that comes up most in this group's reflections. Play, and its close neighbours: curiosity, surprise, freedom, fun. But the play that produced the strongest work here was never random. It came from structure. From knowing enough about the materials and the process to push them. From having a starting point, an artist, a colour palette, a set of shapes, and then letting go just enough to find out what happens when you do. At some point in the course, the techniques stop being mine and start being yours. That's when you stop following the module and start printing with intent. This group discovered that other artists are not finished products to admire from a distance.

They are starting points. That documenting your process is not admin. It is part of the making. That the plate will surprise you, and that surprise is information, not failure. That repetition is worth trusting. And that your own creative instincts are worth following. I hope you enjoy flipping through the pages of this exhibition as much as I did."

– Tara


Would you like a printed copy of this Exhibition book?

Click the button below to purchase the online student exhibition as a printed book. Please note that Peecho (provider of the printed book) is a third party book printing company and we have no control over the postage costs to your destination.

 

2 min read

By Take Two
Aug 6 2026

Art & Design with Tara Axford Student exhibitions

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