Peacock at Drum: The Fine Art of Printmaking brings together a wide range of print works realised at the Peacock workshop in Aberdeen. A hub for creative making and expression in the city, since its foundation Peacock has fostered a nurturing culture around printmaking and the vast possibilities the medium has to offer.

Featuring both local and international artists working at Peacock throughout its 48-year history, the exhibition brings together a wide array of works of dazzling diversity and originality, showcasing the inexhaustible expressions that printmaking can yield to. Its location at Drum Castle, in the gallery space on the top floor, as the final stop of the guided tour of the property, brings the works into a unique conversation with the historical fabric of the castle. The works are arranged into the rooms by technique, encompassing the four traditional printmaking methods as well as a range of innovation and experimentation within them.

The over 40 works on display, as diverse as they are original, each with a story to tell, come together to describe Peacock as a fertile meeting ground where people, stories and ideas intersect and grow.

While some artists are primarily printmakers, many of the artists exhibited here have established practices in other forms of visual arts, such as painting or sculpture. The prints they realised, therefore, are the result of a close collaboration with the printmakers at Peacock, who assist artists in the process and often carry out the proofing and editioning for them.

Places and portraits populate the etching room, ranging from Donald Urquhart’s sleek black and white celebrity portraits to Joyce Cairns’ lyrical narrative of Aberdeen’s Footdee. Some of the works, such as Dawson Murray or Adam Bridgeland’s prints, celebrate the serendipity of artmaking, embracing the unexpected diversions and pathways that can spring up from a dynamic, energetic workplace.

In lithography, the works range from examples of expressive draughtsmanship, such as Pat Douthwaite’s gestural works, to explorations of the very boundaries of the medium, such as Elspeth Lamb’s complex, colourful lithographs integrating traditional Japanese techniques. At the centre of the show, the mixed media room gives a taste to some of the infinite ways that different methods can be integrated to create something entirely unique.

Some rooms elicit curious conversations between artists working in the same medium but with completely different styles. In the room dedicated to relief prints, Tom Hammick’s reduction woodcuts from the Lunar Voyage series are an eerie, melancholic representation of interstellar travel, while Doug Cocker’s visions of outer space border on the nightmarish and the surreal. In screenprinting, Frances Walker’s meditative, personal view of an Antarctic coastal landscape sits alongside Marie Velardi’s poignant yet subtle call for attention to the risks of human intervention on shorelines.

As a means of communication and expression, printmaking has existed for centuries. What sets it aside from other creative practices is the possibility of reproduction and an indirect mark-making process, where the image realised by the artist is transferred from a block, plate, stone or stencil onto paper. Printmaking marries a careful balance between creative expression and the technical skills required to handle tools and machinery. From the first proofs to the final editioning, each print balances technique, experience, and a vibrant artistic sense. At the same time, as in every artform, printmaking also allows to embrace the unexpected and the unforeseen, letting stones, plates and inks shape the process.