How Norfolk inspires artist Amelia Bowman's colourful work

“My daughter is only really interested in being creative, she loses interest in toys very quickly and just goes back to her craft supply, so it’s carrying on down the female line,” she says. 

"It [art] allows me to be me. It’s just an outlet for me to experiment with all my weird and wonderful ideas,” she says.  

Amelia creates gorgeous, cheerful homewares, prints and tote bags inspired by Norfolk and nature: seaside scenes such as the famous stripey Wells beach huts, the colourful canopies of the stalls on Norwich Market, the Broads and flora and fauna.   

Her studio is a converted garage at her home in Wymondham where she creates her work using a technique called collagraph.

Her print press is a converted mangle, which she bought for £20 from eBay. 

“I’ve always loved just tinkering with things, and I’ve always been a bit Heath Robinson and I thought, well, a mangle looks like the same kind of thing really as a print press so maybe I’ll just buy an old mangle and convert it and make it into one," she says.  

It took her quite a while to turn her purchase – which she found in north Norfolk – into a working print press. 

“I had no idea what I was getting myself into, it took nine months, like having a baby," she laughs. 

"I had to take it completely apart, and I had to go and ingratiate myself with steel merchants and rubber merchants. 

“Everyone was brilliant, they were really helpful, and finally I’d got a functional print press that cost a tenth of the price in the end. And it’s still going today. It’s a bit wonky, it’s not particularly well behaved, but we muddle along,” she says. 

Amelia says that her work has always been led by colour. Throughout her GCSEs and A levels she focused on painting and sculpting – her mum is a sculptor – and she then studied textiles at Norwich Art School. 

“At that point in time I was creating very colourful jewellery, with dyed and manipulated plastic, so I was on the edge of textiles,” she says. “After I graduated and was selling it, I realised quite quickly that the bit I was enjoying was the design process and the prototypes and not making the stock. And that’s when I started to move into freelance illustration.” 

Amelia went to work in a high school's art department and she discovered collagraph when they took some of their GCSE students to City College Norwich to learn about different types of printmaking. 

“I was sitting in the corner watching the children learn these techniques – and that was the beginning of this,” she says. 

Collagraph is an intaglio form of printmaking - the opposite of the relief form of printmaking, such as linocut.

“We got a print press at the high school soon after that and I used to get on quite well with the site team so they used to let me in at the weekends and I’d go in and use it,” says Amelia. 

And she didn’t have to look far to find inspiration – the Norfolk countryside where she grew up and the Suffolk coast where her parents had a holiday home. 

“Norfolk’s amazing, isn’t it? It’s kind of like Cornwall, because it’s not on the way to anywhere and there’s something special about that, I think. It seems to be a haven for artists and full of really inspiring vistas – and wherever you get coastline, you’re always going to get artists and people feeling inspired. 

“I love it, I grew up in the middle of nowhere in Barnham Broom – our nearest neighbours were half a mile down the road and we were surrounded by fields. 

“And the coast has always been part of my life – my father is a Cornishman and at the same time these trips to City College were happening my parents had a holiday home on the coast in Suffolk and I was spending quite a lot of time sketching on the beach and then those sketches got made into collagraph plates.” 

Amelia’s pieces are available locally from stockists including The Giggly Goat and Notcutts in Norwich, Quay Art in Wells and Blakeney, Glitter and Mud in Wells, Southwold Pier and the Lion House Gallery in Lavenham. 

She also recently had a pop-up as part of Jarrold’s brilliant Store Folk marketplace, which showcases the work of local creatives, and has a store on Etsy. 

And she also does print-making workshops – her next is scheduled for early February at the Reef House in Blakeney.  

To find out more about Amelia’s work, visit ameliabowman.co.uk, her Etsy shop at etsy.com/AmeliaBowman or Jarrold Store Folk at jarrold.co.uk/brands/amelia-bowman  

For details about Amelia’s workshop at the Reef House, Blakeney, in February, visit reedmakeanddo.com