Prints from a Winter Allotment

The allotment garden behind my building is divided into thirty plots, and in winter only four of them are tended. I spent January and February drawing those four, then cutting them into lino at my kitchen table, one block a week.

Six prints came out of it. The first shows the tool shed with its door propped open by a brick. The second is a row of winter cabbages, which got more ink than anything else, because by December their leaves are the only dark green left in the garden. The third is a water butt with a skin of ice on it. The fourth is my neighbour's wheelbarrow, which has not moved since October. The fifth is the gate. The sixth is a bed of turned earth, waiting.

I printed them in two colours, a warm ochre for the ground and a rust red that I mixed from what was left in three old tins. The registration was not perfect and I kept the misprints. In one of them the red sits two millimetres to the left of where it should, and the whole garden looks as if it is shivering. That one is my favourite.

Linocut is a slow way to look at something. You cannot rub anything out. Every cut is a decision you will see on the paper, and after a few weeks you start to see the garden that way too, as a set of decisions someone made about where to dig and what to leave alone.