Blue Coast

Multiple block reduction relief engraving & woodcut
16cm x 32cm

Neil Bousfield RE works within the discipline of relief printmaking and contemporary wood engraving. He continues to make engravings which explore landscape narrative through the concept of place and place attachment. He was born in Middlesbrough, and grew up in the coastal village of Marske-by-the-Sea, and Redcar, in North Yorkshire.

Bousfield studied at Cleveland College of Art and Design, Middlesbrough, BA (Hons) Film & Animation at West Surrey College of Art and Design, and MSc CAGTA at Teesside University, Middlesbrough. More recently he studied at Bristol’s University of the West of England where he gained a Master of Arts degree in Multi-Disciplinary Printmaking, awarded with distinction.

Bousfield is an elected member of The Society of Wood Engravers and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers. His work is held in private and public collections. He now lives and works on the North Norfolk coast.

Blue Coast is a multiple block engraving and woodcut exploring ideas associated with place and place making. The abstracted landscape references maps, mapping, aerial photography and scans of the North Sea bed. The work aims to raise questions about communities and people who invest in places which will be lost to sea-level rise and to illustrate a deepening understanding of the loss of the Norfolk coast to the sea. With increasing concern about climate change, the transitional space between the land and the sea has a fragile mutability as the shore acts as a barometer of even greater change.