Edinburgh Printmakers has been at the heart of the capital’s art scene for four decades, providing access to its workshop for emerging and established artists alike, and raising the profile of the print in its gallery space. To mark the anniversary, the Printmakers is set to mount an ambitious pair of exhibitions, setting out the institution’s history and surveying work from the past 40 years.

The workshop and gallery opened its doors in 1967 on Victoria Street, set up by gallerist Robert Cox and artist Phil Reeves, along with founding members Roy Wood and Kim Kempshall. For Gill Tyson, vice-chair of the Printmakers’ council, whose involvement with the project dates back to her days as an art student in the 1970s, the timing was right.

“It really grew out of that resurgence of printmaking in the 1950s,” she says, “when printmaking began to move into the fine art department at the art colleges. Then it came down to the fact that there was a lot going on in Edinburgh at the time - there was a strong artistic revival and a strong alternative artistic community, artists such as John Bellany and Sandy Moffat were coming out and keen to continue with printmaking.”

After a stint at Victoria Street, in a cramped room adjacent to Robert Cox’s gallery, the Printmakers moved to Market Street in 1975, then, as now, a hub for artistic activity in the city.

“Victoria Street was, really, entirely unsuitable as premises for a print workshop,” Tyson remembers, “so the chance to move to Market Street was a great opportunity. We were right above the Fruitmarket Gallery, and next door to the New 57 Gallery, which was an incredibly lively place.’ When the Fruitmarket was made independent of the Scottish Arts Council in 1983, Edinburgh Printmakers was forced to up sticks once more, finding, after a difficult search, its current premises in a former wash house on Union Street - Tyson, by then chair, was the first to enter the main hall. This move to a larger space led to expansion, with the Printmakers’ publishing more artists’ editions, and collaborating with non-printmaking artists as well as making its facilities available to members.

The twin gallery spaces also allowed the Printmakers to continue its commitment to bringing printmaking to a wider audience.

“As well as providing the facilities for artists to make prints,” Tyson explains, “a lot of our work has been about promoting printmaking. And I think we’ve done pretty well at that - we certainly have an international reputation.’ That reputation also applies to Scotland as a whole, with workshops across the country opening in the wake of the Edinburgh Printmakers’ early success.

“Now we have Edinburgh Printmakers, Glasgow Print Studio, Peacock in Aberdeen and the workshop in Dundee,” Tyson explains. “Printmaking is a really strong strand to the visual arts in Scotland. It’s definitely something peculiar to Scotland - of course you get print workshops in other places, but to have so many open-access print workshops here? I see that as something of a Scottish success story.”

The first exhibition celebrating Edinburgh Printmakers’ part in that success story focuses on the first 20 years of its output, aiming both to showcase work made by artists in the workshop, or in collaboration with it, and to document the organisation’s history.

“There wasn’t an awful lot in the workshop in terms of archive materials,” says Tyson, “so we had to get in touch with a lot of people who had been involved over the years. It was amazing the warmth and affection they all had for the institution, and we were faced with this deluge of cards, editions and photographs.”

Some of those materials have been put to use in a short film to be screened in the gallery throughout the exhibition.

“For the film, I interviewed Philip Reeve and Roy Wood, the founder members, and Alfons Bytautas, whose been our etching technician since 1974,” Tyson says.

“They told all their old war stories. It’s really remarkable to hear how they did so much, how they made all these international connections, even though there were so few of them.’ Then, of course, there are the prints, by artists including Peter Howson and Stephen Conroy, alongside work by the founding members. “We went for the good ones!”, Tyson jokes, explaining the process of whittling down 40 years’ worth of work into a manageable show. “We really wanted a spread of things that would show what was happening at the time in printmaking, and to have works that represented shows we’d had over the years, as well as a mix of prints by printmakers and by artists working in collaboration with the workshop.’ 40 Years at Edinburgh Printmakers should, then, be an intriguing exhibit, offering a chance to trace trends, to survey the work of a wide-ranging and disparate group of artists, and, perhaps best of all, fully to understand the role of this Edinburgh institution, the first open-access print workshop in the UK, in driving forward the practice of printmaking.

This review was first published in The Herald on January 9th, 2007.