Sally Spens is a printmaker whose work brings together fine art, textile design and the traditions of the decorative arts. Her intricate etchings are rooted in drawing and observation, but are equally informed by an exceptional international career in textile design and a longstanding engagement with Japanese visual culture.
Spens studied Fine Art and Textiles at Goldsmiths' College in London before working as a textile designer in London, New York and Japan. In partnership with Kim Bentley, she established the design studio Bentley & Spens, producing painted and printed textiles for fashion and interiors. Their work entered the Victoria and Albert Museum's collections in 1989 and has subsequently been represented in a number of V&A exhibitions, including The European Art of Textiles, Recent Acquisitions and Kimono: Kyoto to Catwalk.
A particularly significant chapter in Spens's career was the seven-year collaboration with Kawashima, the Kyoto textile company, for which Bentley & Spens created seventy-seven designs for yukata, the informal summer kimono. The project brought together Western textile design and Japanese craftsmanship on an unusually sustained scale and has been documented by the V&A as a distinctive example of this exchange between Western designers and a Japanese textile manufacturer.
Spens returned to etching after her years in textile design, developing a practice in which the sensibility of the textile designer remains fundamental. Since 2007 she has worked extensively in intaglio printmaking, translating drawings and painted studies onto copper plate. Her prints retain an appreciation for rhythm, repetition, pattern and carefully balanced composition, while the physical process of etching introduces an element of transformation between the original drawing and the finished work.
Her work has been exhibited internationally, including in Hong Kong, Singapore, China, Venice, Milan, Miami and New York. In 2015 she was selected for the Xiaoxiang International Printmaking Exhibition in China, and she has undertaken artist residencies at the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica in Venice in 2018 and 2022. In 2022 she exhibited nine etchings at Palazzo Bembo in Venice as part of the European Cultural Centre's Personal Structures exhibition during the Venice Art Biennale.
Now based in Cornwall, Spens continues to develop a body of work in which the observed world becomes a starting point for something more ambiguous and associative. Plants, geological forms, vessels, gardens, water and landscape recur throughout her imagery, transformed through drawing and print into compositions that sit between representation and abstraction.
Her practice is characterised by an unusual continuity between her early training, her international experience as a textile designer and her mature work as a printmaker. The influence of Japan is particularly important: not simply as a source of visual motifs, but as an enduring example of the close relationship between the fine and applied arts, craftsmanship and the considered treatment of pattern and surface.
Spens's prints are meticulously made but never merely descriptive. Through the accumulation of fine lines, colour, pattern and carefully judged space, familiar natural forms become poetic and sometimes enigmatic images - works in which meaning is allowed to emerge gradually through looking.