Louise trained as a printmaker and over the years has developed her own style of working with her favoured metal; Copper. Using a needle point and a magnifying glass she creates finely detailed etchings, and more recently work that halts the etching process at the metal stage thus allowing the satisfying glow of copper to come through the soft, smoked black of the ground used on a prepared copper etching plate.

As a printmaker with a love for the natural world Louise has developed a fascination for early victorian zoology text books where the scientists had to initially create the artwork themselves before it was then reproduced as engravings or etchings for the text books. This lent the subject matter a feeling of enthusiasm and creativity that Louise feels was slowly lost as the sciences, photography and commercial printmaking developed.

Running alongside this interest Louise also has a love for early marine exploration and more especially the art of map making; marine charts in particular where, again the art of the intaglio printmakers in the 19th and 20th centuries showed the same creativity and exuberance as in the sciences.

Louises’ present work is exploring the combination of print techniques such as blind embossing, soft ground and open bite with Copper, collage, found objects and pressed flora. She wants to reinvent and then convey that Victorian sense of wonder and curiosity in the natural world to a modern viewer 

After 1989 I worked for a number of years in Conservation until I went to work at the Bird Observatory on the island of North Ronaldsay in Orkney. Whilst on the tiny island I started to create my distinctive style of etching, using a sewing needle sellotaped to a pencil