Carol Nunan — Printmaker, Isle of Bute

Fine art prints inspired by Scotland and Northumberland

In 1998, I was in the local library looking for books for my children when I picked up a brochure for the Centre for Lifelong Learning. My husband travelled constantly, which meant I was effectively a full-time mother with very little time to call my own. When he was home, I signed up for a printmaking workshop — partly to try something new, partly just to claim back a few hours for myself.

I was struggling with postnatal depression at the time, though I didn't fully understand that then. What I knew was that something about those first pulled prints felt like a door opening. I had no idea it would change everything.

More than two decades on, I'm still in the studio every day — and I've spent much of that time helping others find what I found: a way back to themselves. Some come through mental health organisations. Some simply book a workshop. Many arrive not quite knowing why they're drawn to it. They leave having found out.

Where It All Started

There is a strong artistic vein running through my family. My great-aunt studied at London's Slade School in the early 1930s — a rare achievement for a woman at that time — and that connection became a kind of permission for all of us to pursue art seriously.

My cousins, my son and I each followed that creative spark into painting, printmaking, ceramics and cinematography.

A Journey Across Continents

Ireland → Zambia → Ireland → South Africa → Northumberland → Isle of Bute

I was born in Ireland but spent my formative years in Zambia, absorbing cultures and landscapes that have shaped everything since. At sixteen I returned to Ireland, graduated from the National College of Art & Design in Dublin with a degree in Visual Communications, then headed to South Africa to explore graphic design. Cape Town is where I met my husband. We settled in Northumberland, and thirty three years later fulfilled our dream of moving to Scotland's Isle of Bute.

From Student to Studio Owner

That first workshop led to another, and then another. By 2000 I was showing work on the Northumberland Art Tour, and two years later I was invited to exhibit at the newly opened Biscuit Factory in Newcastle Upon Tyne. Around the same time my teacher, Rebecca Vincent, asked me to cover her maternity leave. I'd become a printmaker. Now, apparently, I was a teacher too.

In 2003, rather than lose the community we'd built together when funding for the Centre for Lifelong Learning was cut, Rebecca and I formed Horsley Printmakers — two mothers with young children, determined to make our art pay for itself. It was through those CLL workshops that I first became aware of how profoundly printmaking could affect people struggling with their mental health. That quiet discovery would shape the next chapter of my practice.

When personal circumstances eventually brought the partnership to a close, I took on my own studio on the edge of Hexham in 2015. The mental health thread continued — I spent four years delivering workshops at North Tyneside Art Studio, where GPs referred patients as part of their care, and worked with patients in the radiotherapy department at the Freeman Hospital in Newcastle. Others simply found their way to my regular workshops on their own — signed off work, suffering from anxiety or depression, drawn to printmaking for reasons they didn’t fully understand.

What I learned across all of it confirmed what I had known from my own experience from 1998 onwards — that there is something about making art through printmaking, the focus it demands and the surprises it delivers, that reaches people in ways little else can.

What Inspires My Work

My work is rooted in the landscapes I've called home. In Northumberland it was the untamed moorland, the coastline, the ancient sites along Hadrian's Wall. Now, on the Isle of Bute, it's the ever-changing light over Rothesay Bay, the weather rolling in off the Atlantic, and the rich wildlife of the island's moors and shorelines.

Both places share something: a rawness, a sense of space over land, sea and skies that gives me room to breathe. That's what draws me — and what I try to capture through bold marks, unexpected colours, and the particular unpredictability of monotype and collagraph printing. Each print begins with an intention and ends somewhere I never quite planned. I've never tired of that.