David Krut Workshop undertook a real time print residency with artist and long-time collaborator Stephen Hobbs for the duration of Turbine Art Fair. Visitors observed the artist and printers in action as they worked to produce a series of available, hot-off-the-press prints using the mediums of silkscreen, monotype, linocut, and paper sculpture. This initiative is aimed at providing insight into the traditional process of hand-made fine art editions, as well as the importance of collecting prints.

Hobbs’ current work explores the home-based architecture of lockdown and visual manifestations of its effects on the psyche and family relationships.

Hobbs and family moved to a rural village in the Republic of Ireland 4 months before the Covid-19 lockdown. Of the many restrictions imposed at the time, movement by car was restricted to a 5 km radius from one’s place of residence. In the absence of readily accessible art materials, Hobbs turned to the flurry of cardboard box packaging coming from online purchases. In their open, die-cut form, the boxes echoed floor plans of an imaginary kind. Enamoured with the domestic scale and functional features of the bungalow they moved into, the boxes in their flat-form became the substrate for a range of drawings executed in reflective tape; early beginnings for a body of work that reflects on the housing revolution that took place in rural Ireland in the early 1970’s.