Edition 12
2026 Open Printmaking Exhibition
The Medium is the Message
Private View: Saturday 9th May 6pm - 8pm
Exhibition: Friday 8th - Saturday 16th May 2026, Open: 12pm - 5pm / Sun 1pm - 4pm
We are celebrating 12 years of 44AD’s Annual Open Printmaking Exhibition! Edition 12, features over 40 printmakers interpreting the theme ’The Medium is the Message’. Come and view an exciting range of contemporary printmaking talent; a showcase of framed originals, editions, zines and installation - working across a variety of printmaking disciplines such as etching, mono-print, linoprint, woodcut, screen print, drypoint and collagraph...
With much of the artwork available to purchase, this is an exhibition not to be missed!
This year, our annual Open Printmaking exhibition Edition 12 celebrates Louise Ingham, Nigel Leach and the Bath Community Printshop legacy; featuring some of the Printshop posters archive, as part of a wider exhibition trail of the posters, organised by Bath Fringe Festival.
The Medium is the Message Exhibition Trail
Bath Community Printshop Archives, 1977-83
Bath Fringe Festival
From 1977-83 the Bath Printshop occupied various premises on and around the London Road, for most of that time and most memorably in Longacre, where there is now a posh kitchen showroom; above was the Longacre Hall gig and community centre.
For the cost of materials you could screen-print posters for your band, your meeting, your campaign; you could learn how, too: screenprinting was an essential skill, and you could get quite a few done before the design wore out. There is a bit more history in the excellent ‘Bath Arts Workshop - Counterculture in the 1970s’ book [still available!].
On the demise last year of one of the prime movers, Nigel Leach, a stash of posters was discovered; a bit more searching - and the collaboration of another founding figure, Louise Ingham - revealed more: and we started feeling there was an exhibition in it.
Which there proved to be. More than one!
There was also a world of stories: every band, sound system, campaign group, every venue or community centre, holds a tale of a Bath that is not so very different from today - recognisable, but recognisably not the same - which held all these different institutions. We’ve tracked down a number of those stories too.
Two things stood out to us. Firstly, all the community spaces and gig rooms that are no more - mostly casualties of the Bath property boom of the ‘90s and beyond, re-gentrification in this case. It really says something that this exhibition is here in a community arts resource which has taken Churchillian amounts of Blood, Sweat & Tears to keep open - and the other venues we are using signify with their own stories too. Secondly, nearly all the campaign issues that posters were shouting about are still issues today: housing, pollution, nuclear weapons, American interventionism...Ever thought “I told you so...”?
Some Bath Spa University students - from the same course that produces the Fringe’s cover/poster artist every year - got excited too, and made excellent work in the same spirit with the same techniques.
It’s all here, and - fittingly for posters that appeared on walls all over the city - at other exhibition sites too.
Steve - Bath Fringe Festival
The Medium is the Message is a phrase coined by theorist Marshall McLuhan, who suggested that how something is communicated can be just as important as what is being said. In simple terms, it means the materials, processes, and methods you use in printmaking aren’t just tools, they are part of the meaning of the artwork itself.
Printmaking has long been associated with sharing ideas widely, from political posters to fine art editions. Early printmaking changed the speed at which ideas could spread. The immediacy of contemporary printing (e.g. posters for protests) allows for an on-the-spot response to current events.
By embracing serial reproduction, printmaking can challenge traditional art-world notions of authorship, uniqueness, and value, favouring community, collective voice, and, in some cases, the more permanent nature of analogue printing over digital communication.
The medium of printmaking acts as a message by embodying the values of the cause, directness, solidarity, public engagement, and accessibility, rather than just passively carrying information.