Emmet O’Dwyer: Magic Mountains

Magic Mountains presents a selection of striking colour prints by local artist Emmet O’Dwyer. Capturing expansive viewpoints from high up within the landscape, O’Dwyer’s technical deftness with the medium of print distils the complexity of the world into simplified and reduced abstract forms.

O’Dwyer’s works are both woodcut and linocut prints; made by progressively layering flat colours on top of one-another, each different colour represents a separate incised block. These ‘relief’ prints are a simple form of reproducing images, dating back to the fifteenth century in the West and much earlier in the East.

O’Dwyer enjoys the challenge of working with such simplified physical objects like wood and paper, noting:

“This restriction of medium forces clever problem solving and lessens the number of things that can go wrong; you don’t have a dozen colours to mix into mud. Within this, the materials ‘misbehaving’ and not being entirely under your control causes many happy little accidents. Revealing a proof (first print) is always a surprise, for better or worse, and not unlike seeing a photo develop in a darkroom.”

Several prints on display were influenced by a recent trip to Japan, where O’Dwyer was impressed by the refined, stripped back quality of contemporary Japanese graphic design, book design, and illustration.

Growing up in Shepparton, O’Dwyer studied Fine Art at the Victorian College of the Arts and Monash University, majoring in Printmaking.