Belfast Print Workshop

Now to be honest I’ve only ever been here a couple of times before. Once was a long time ago at a kind’ve ‘open night’ for the complex where an artist I know had a workshop in there and promised me free red wine. I know, I know… that’s a cheap admission.
Anyway, I’d only really been aware of the ground level gallery in this great building but it was amazing to check out all the different workshops and the variety of the print making available. Of special note was one dude who spent a lengthy time talking me through the process itself and how he achieved his end result.
Apparently you can visit the workshops and buy the work as well. The ‘open night’ seemed to be successful as well as there seemed to be a lot of people in and buying or ordering work.
The gallery downstairs is always worth a look as it every changing and there’s plenty of young (and not so young) vibrant art on display.
Pros: Unique gallery/​workspace.
Cons: Small exhibition space.

The gallery at Belfast Print Workshop isn’t much more than a small room which you walk more or less straight into from Cotton Court, right opposite the Victorian façade of the Merchant Hotel. A sense of creativity and enthusiasm shows in the collection of prints that are for sale here produced by the workshop members who populate the studio units upstairs. Prints are made in the old fashioned traditional methods of engraving and intaglio and have a special quality that is far removed the computer generated stuff that surrounds us most of the time. I went to an exhibition opening there recently where a rarefied, small artist crowd had gathered which presumably consisted mainly of those associated with the workshop. It’s pretty exclusive but also a good way of seeing what the type of work being produced in the higher echelons of the artistic community here in Belfast