Striking collograph portraits by Glasgow grad and illustrator Ianthe Hope

During her final year at Glasgow School of Art illustrator Ianthe Hope found herself preoccupied with creating portraits. “The face has always fascinated me, how we are all the same but also visually completely different, and this has played into my work a lot,” Ianthe explains. “In my head I give each portrait a personality, a job and a name. Some are based on people I know and some are fictional characters.”

We were drawn in by the alluring alien nature of her collograph portraits. The repetition of various facial features in these acts as an othering device, she says, toying with the human instinct to compare and judge. Interestingly though, in the context of her portraits a subject with three sets of eyes or two noses ceases to look unusual, instead becoming the new norm.

This context of the Other takes on further resonance given Ianthe’s medium; she prints the images using collography, in which a design is carved onto a piece of hardboard, varnished, inked and then printed. “Each plate lets you print about 20-25 times before becoming flattened,” she says, so these strange new faces exist for a limited amount of time before being erased, after which point they survive only as images. It’s a powerful juxtaposition of a new idea with a traditional technique, and it cuts through the complex, abstract internet art we’re inundated with on a day-to-day basis to achieve something altogether more exciting.