Mark Elvins is an artist who says he has always drawn and always painted. However, more recently he has started combining his love of lonely hillwalking in the high places with a fascination for printmaking, something first kindled by his kindled while young. Mark has an eye for things that resonate visually, that sum up a place or that ask a question, a certain sense of place that if you can feel it, you might be able to catch on paper for others to see. The hidden whispering inside a wood, the freedom of a passing cloud now gone forever, the cheerful cold-shouldering of a mountain stream. It's these moments that he tries to engage with in lino prints.

Mark studied human history for ten years, culminating in an MA degree from Oxford University. Those studies afford him an unlooked-for perspective on The Land. Though he says he is still working out how exactly, however, it is something to do with how people use the Land, sculpt it, mark it, divide it, make paths across it, and sometimes leave it alone. The history of the Land is important.

Drawn back to art, he dropped what he was doing and returned to university to obtain another MA, this time from Cambridge School of Art, in 2018. Now living in Yorkshire he traveles to the high places in Scotland and the Lake District for inspiration and looks at the daily surroundings around Yorkshire for sustenance.

Mark says that the process of realising a subject, getting it, carving its subtleties into lino layers, and printing them, often over each other, is exhilarating absorbing him utterly, feeling monumental and free yet unpredictable, like the Land.