Exhibition preview: Lisa Cradduck – Blue Plague, WestLane South, London, until February 16 2013

Partly a response to funding cuts for arts education and culture, partly a series of dreamlike, Mexican linocut-influenced additions to the crowds Lisa Cradduck witnessed during the student fee demonstrations at the end of 2010, Blue Plaque is a work in progress, evolving throughout the show alongside a live print school on Thursdays and Saturdays.

Grinning skeletons do little to ease the sense of violence thronging the scenes. “Tory influence is a bubonic miasma,” reckons Cradduck, whose large-scale etching of the moon, made during a residency at The Venice Printmaking Studio in Italy the following year, will appear in The Venice Biennale of Large Format Printmaking 2013.

“It pollutes the atmosphere and poisons the social body. To disadvantaged people, it can be fatal.”

Traditional printmaking techniques, mark-making and scholarly levels of research are Cradduck’s hallmarks, realised in monochromatic style.

She is currently investigating constructivist dressmaking, 19th century asylum architecture and early 20th century Mexican prints.

• WestLane South, West Lane, London. Open Thursday-Saturday 12pm-6pm. Admission free. Visit the gallery's Facebook page.

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