You may not know what a ‘smeuse’ is; I didn’t, until the summer before last, when I was sent the manuscript for Robert Macfarlane’s book Landmarks. In the book he has prepared a number of glossaries of words which you would struggle to find in a standard dictionary. They are words from dialect, slang and so on, and describe matters loosely pertaining to the land. An old Essex dialect term for a kestrel is ‘wind-fucker’. An old Sussex word for the gap at the bottom of a hedge made by the regular passage of a small animal is… smeuse.
His publishers aimed, presumably, to capitalise on the success of the book by bringing out a second edition with a different cover. But not very different. So here is a ‘winter smeuse’, with thorns and snow and a distant, weary traveller.
This print is a screen-printed adaptation of the linocut work I did for the cover of the second edition of Landmarks
Edition of 88 prints
3 colour screen print
Paper size: 337mm x 477mm
Image size: 255mm x 375mm
Printed on acid-free archival 300gsm Somerset Satin
