Collection: John Pedder
John Pedder finds that woodcut printing slows him down, allowing him to invest more of himself in apparently simple marks. He has a need to bring craft skills into any work he embarks upon and printmaking, and more specifically woodcut printmaking affords him the opportunity to bring the intense physicality of this medium and inject it into his work. He spent most of his life avoiding the sophistication that experience and refined craft skills will inevitably bring, using them instead to constantly distil his images. John’s main motive is the basic need to create. The subject matter tends to deal with the nobility of life: finding the honour and goodness in a person, a deed, a situation, coupled with with a large helping of humour, then hopefully you have what you see before you, an aesthetic journey using craft skills and design to try to make sense of an increasingly bewildering world. Sophistication is all well and good but in the primitive you will find the real truth.