02/08/2026
Alexandra Motiu, Artist in Focus 3rd – 16th August 2026
My work explores storytelling, symbolism, and the human condition through hand-carved relief printmaking. I work intuitively, allowing characters and narratives to emerge directly from the block, embracing imperfection and material resistance as part of the meaning. My imagery often sits between the personal and the collective, drawing on myth, folklore, and social memory to reflect on power, care, labour, and identity. My practice celebrates slowness, tactility, and is entirely guided by the printmaking process. I am deeply loyal and embedded in the heritage of the craft, while revelling in the opportunity of making my own artistic decisions that will veer from tradition.
Artist Statement:
Alexandra Motiu is a printmaker and illustrator with a fine art background. She works with original printmaking techniques – mainly relief, linocut and wood engraving and has experience in etching, metal engraving & monotype. Her work has surreal qualities and humour, with an old masters' feel. She aims to make hauntingly beautiful work that will stay with the viewer for a long time. Enjoying busy compositions with complex stories which she builds up like a collage, her works are often rooted in myth and folklore.
Alexandra creates detailed, decorative, and surreal prints that are entirely guided by the processes she works with, where mistakes are appreciated and oddities shine. She draws inspiration from people, specifically portraiture and it is from this sister art form that the stories encapsulated in her prints often develop.
Her recent work has concentrated on using traditional printmaking techniques as a means to uncover the hidden stories of the past: particularly in relation to labour, and labour rights. An understanding of printmaking as a practice of resistance; where slowness, care, and repetition are pivotal. This has helped her connect deeply to its history as a trade and given her an insight into what work looked like in the past and what it may evolve into in the future.
Alexandra’s very personal creativity process allows her to directly connect to her work, its historical roots and techniques and, thereby, its finished form. She is passionate about embracing and preserving the knowledge of her craft/trade in its entire creative form, past and present.
Background:
After completing a BA (Hons) Fine Art Critical Practice at Brighton, and an MA Illustration from Camberwell College, UAL, where she graduated with Distinction, Alexandra's notable projects are illustrated stories from the Bishopsgate Archive, the illustrated poetry book Effigies by Ricardo Reveron Blanco, and a commission of exclusive prints for Fabrica Gallery in Brighton. Her work has been featured in international exhibitions over the past three years throughout Europe and the US, and is permanently at IO Gallery in Brighton, here at Southbank Printmakers, and Greenwich Printmakers in London. She shares online the process of making original prints which she is passionate about preserving.
Ideas behind Effigies and Lady Death:
Effigies (Ricardo Reveron Blanco’s debut poetry book) explores different parts that make the self and portrays these as individual characters, and I was asked to give my (surreal) interpretation of what these might look like.
Ricardo’s poetry has strong storytelling tendencies, such as in The Cacti Queen or The Migrant, and I leaned heavily into that aspect of his work with the illustrations. He often uses comparisons and metaphors which immediately transport you into the surreal world and melancholic feeling he is building.
In Lady Death, you can find the foxgloves that “fade to black from pink” in her skirt; The Noctambulant is a lost 1920’s lady without her Gatsby, the life of the party, and in the Cacti Queen, some plants start looking like her subjects. All these already very visual elements of Ricardo’s poetry appear in the illustrations, just as they do in his poetry, as intoxicating amalgamations, so that the reader is completely involved into the dream-like, nostalgic, romantic and engulfing worlds that he is building.
Away with the circus III and Up Above, Down Below:
In Brighton there is a group of circus performers who dress up for the purpose of being drawn called The Drawing Circus, and they have been an endless resource for me.
The circus as a theme is inspiring as our oddities and eccentricities become talents to capitalise on, and in doing so, it almost seems to be a practice of protest against the society that has marginalised those oddities in the first place. But of course, you do end up being still in society, and it is still a job, so most of my characters will be sad or bored. There is something haunting to me about a performer in their time off, after the show, after they have given so much.
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