The two works of art in this duo, Anna Alcock’s Guardian Angel and Circular form by Cecil Skotnes, were chosen not only for their shared medium or their circular formation but also for the tenderness and softness of action that both evoke.

Skotnes was attracted to the iconographical challenge woodcutting posed and his first woodcut prints were of landscapes. Their impetus was natural form and his exploration of a landscape’s spatial conventions would later result in the incised figurative panels we have come to know as broadly representative of his work.
Circular form is unusual; it is not the incised panel as the object but it is also neither clearly figurative nor a conventional landscape. Its intriguing shape lies more in its ability to transform: it could be a forward folded form or, perhaps, a compressed landscape. When viewed alongside Anna Alcock’s Guardian Angel, it seems as though the forward-reaching, vertical lines of Skotnes’s circular form could unfold into the arms of the guardian in Alcock’s embracing figure; a continuous cycle of morphing from abstract form to representational form and back again- a cyclical process.

Both artists inspire a sense of spiritual mystery in their bodies of work- Skotnes developing an interest in religious archetypes and Alcock exploring mythology. I find it fascinating, having studied printmaking but having never worked with woodcuts, that a hardened material could be shaped so tenderly into images delicate and closely held by stark, incised lines and black ink, to make of the artists masters of stories from comparative mythologies.