Artwork description:

School Prints revives a groundbreaking scheme set up in the 1940s to supply original, high-quality contemporary art to primary schools. Six British artists – Martin Creed, Jeremy Deller, Anthea Hamilton, Helen Marten, Haroon Mirza and Rose Wylie – have been invited to create limited edition prints that will be given to the Wakefield primary schools taking part in the scheme.

To coincide with the exhibition, we are delighted to offer for sale a series of the limited edition prints, kindly donated by the artists. All profits raised by the sales of the prints will fund a full engagement programme with the participating schools.

'The body and its movement through the various volumes of daily space has long been a starting point for artists through history. In this lithograph, the primary lines construct a huddled group of figures, morphing through one another in a manner that could describe an embrace, but also the metaphoric dissolution of one form into many. This body could be one gender or multiples of a state more flexible and deconstructed than any binary classification.

The amorphous blobs and shapes that surround the central protagonists are both landscapes (approximate trees or plant life) and shifting forms whose semi-legibility joins the figures in a refusal to conform to definite meaning. The surrounding shapes disguise yet more faces, sentences and alphabet forms which provide the landscape with a more surreal grammar – this is a landscape in which fabrications are possible and encouraged. There are painterly marks, splashes and drips which combine in a celebration of texture and the authorial gestures of mark-making.

With its softly pastel palette, the lithograph relies on colours not quite reminiscent of our daily lives. They are neither psychedelic nor magical but plausibly just one junction removed from reality. Perhaps this is the space of memory, of dreams, or surrealist apparition. Who are these figures? What are their relationships to us the viewer and where are we all going?' - Helen Marten