Alice Irwin by Thomas Marks

There’s a Michael Donaghy poem, ‘Machines’, in which the poet compares a harpsichord player at the keyboard to a cyclist on a racing bike. For each at their tasks, poise and momentum are mutually dependent: bicyclist and harpsichordist alike are figures, Donaghy writes, ‘Who only by moving can balance, / Only by balancing move.’

Those lines come to mind when I visit the artist Alice Irwin at her studio in East London. It’s not just that Irwin is herself a keen road cyclist: she pedalled down to Canterbury last autumn, for instance, to see Peeps (2021), a group of her jaunty steel figures, installed outside the city’s main cultural centre, the Beaney House of Art & Knowledge. It is also, more pertinently, that Donaghy’s conceit neatly encapsulates how this prolific young artist approaches her work. Indeed, as we scrutinise in turn monoprints, iPad drawings, Perspex sculptures, renderings, etchings and even a few paintings, I am struck by just how far, for her, the very making of art is a means to make headway with it.

Irwin agrees. ‘I need to make work to find out where it’s going to go,’ she says: ‘sometimes you push through barriers and arrive at a place you didn’t expect.’ A print, as she works on it, might ‘need to become something three-dimensional’; the shadows cast by a group of her sculptures might in turn suggest new directions for making prints. For Irwin, process means progress: ‘things have to keep moving,’ she says.

In a sense, this emphasis on process is to be expected from an artist for whom printmaking, with its complex methods, is the keynote of her work. In its various modes, printmaking is a medium in which exactitude meets innovation, to the extent that the technical understanding required to make, say, an etching, is imperative to any artist wishing to experiment gainfully in this field. Irwin is certainly fluent in the techniques, having studied printmaking first at City & Guilds of London Art School and then, for her MA, at the RCA. In the print studio just along the corridor from her own space, she talks me through what, to me, look like brilliantly mystifying contraptions – a cast-iron etching press, a flat-bed press for screen printing, an aquatint box – with the patience of an attentive teacher.

Irwin has sometimes been told that she is a messy printmaker. In part that’s because, unlike most printmakers, she doesn’t strive to replicate the same image over and again, making editions in which each iteration is faithful to the others. Instead, Irwin creates unique images in series, each print a riff on a set of predetermined conditions: a particular combination of silkscreen stencils, say; or the density with which Irwin, for a given series, has decided to overlay them; or the coverage, more or less profuse, of ink across white paper. For this artist, the print studio represents less honed routine than imaginative potential: it is not so much factory as playground.

Take recent series such as Muddle (2021) or Homebound (2020), both fine expressions of Irwin’s purposeful exuberance. In the former, the prints are built up by layering geometric stencils – some entire circles, some segments of circles – to create an organised disarray, often extending to the edges of the sheet; on to these large, intersecting planes of ink a crowd of smaller shapes has been printed. Perhaps they are abstract doodles, perhaps laconic vegetal forms or figures, perhaps pipes, limbs, even brass instruments. In Homebound, the visual order is ostensibly more legible, with each print depicting groups of figures enclosed within the simplified outline of a house. But here a complex range of moods is evoked by the differing superimpositions of pink, orange and blue inks, achieving an audacious variety of tonal complements and contrasts. (Irwin has long confined her palette to these three colours: ‘that way there’s something to restrict me,’ she says.)

It is rare to encounter prints as expressive or direct as these. They are akin to gestural paintings, only with silkscreens and squeegees usurping the paintbrush. To arrive at this distinctive idiom Irwin has, first by accident then design, stood apart from conventional teaching. As a teenager growing up in Saffron Walden, Essex, her severe dyslexia meant that she struggled with academic subjects; her teachers encouraged her to spend schooldays in the art room instead. Later, at the RCA, she started to move away from precise figurative work – at the time, she was etching ‘impeccable faces’ – as she gradually came to the realisation that ‘you don’t have to follow the books’. As she sought to develop a visual language of her own, she began to collect children’s drawings, rediscovering the simple eloquence of their organic, approximate forms. ‘I uneducated myself,’ she says, ‘then started learning again from children’s drawings, then by looking at artists such as Picasso and Matisse, and especially his cut-outs […] I hadn’t previously appreciated how something so simple could mean so much.’ Keith Haring and Annette Messager have also been key influences, with their unmistakeable, pared-back modes of representation.

From this has emerged a vocabulary of distinctive symbols, which take on different meanings as Irwin moves them into new contexts in both two- and three-dimensional work. ‘I never want to get too comfortable with the language,’ she says. There is a shape like a ladder, for instance, which stems from Irwin’s interest in the origins of the game Snakes and Ladders as a device for fortune-telling. There are eyes, increasingly abstracted in recent work, which tell of her fascination in how we seek to read other people through the face that they present to the world. Most persistently, there is a shape like a cartoon hand with three fingers, reminiscent of one of Matisse’s cut-out fronds. In Irwin’s most figurative etchings, this becomes a balloon. It can stand in for a head, as it does in several of the People Play figures (2020), the giant steel cut-outs that Irwin has shown at the Piece Hall, Halifax, and Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens near Penzance. Sometimes it is just an interesting shape.

Play is central to Irwin’s work. Not in the sense of glibness, nor that of childish games, although it might well encompass such things (and her lighthearted titles, from Peeps to Cheeky Dips, sometimes evoke them). Rather, for Irwin, play is at once a mode of expression and a means of investigation – of how we process thoughts and emotions, and how we relate to other people and the world. She would love to design a playground one day, since playgrounds are ‘good metaphors for life’: places where the expectation to have fun is often attended by the experience of complex emotions such as rivalry or fear.

Irwin is also intrigued by how play brings imaginative freedom into tension with rules. Some of her sculptures, such as Treehouse (2018), are designed to resemble toys, but the viewer is forbidden from touching them; the figures of Peeps and People Play seem to invite interaction but do so on terms that are undefined. Indeed, as an artist Irwin is forever reimagining the relationship between licence and constraint: from the unruly potential that comes from working on unconventional scales (some of her screenprints are two metres across) to the conscious restrictions that derive from picking up an etching plate and needle (‘etching reins me in a bit,’ she says). ‘I guess my whole process is a game,’ Irwin says – a game that gives rise to some serious fun.