Stewart Taylor is a Devon-based printmaker whose work combines elements of photography, drawing, painting and experimental monoprint techniques. Much of his recent practice has centred around landscape, ecology, memory and humanity’s changing relationship with the natural world.
He is best known for The Tree Portraits — an ongoing body of more than 400 one-off monoprints that began in East London during 2020. Initially derived from pollarded street trees near his former home, the series gradually evolved into a broader meditation on resilience, environmental change, rewilding, and the overlooked character of trees in both urban and rural landscapes.
The works are created primarily using Gelli Arts® gel printing plates, a process Stewart has explored extensively over the past eight years. The immediacy and portability of gel printing originally allowed him to work while travelling through the USA, Spain and Portugal, often printing directly in response to the landscapes around him. Over time, this evolved into a highly distinctive visual language that combines layered textures, painterly surfaces and experimental mark-making.
The Tree Portraits series earned Stewart the Creativepool Artist of the Year award in 2024, and works from the project have been exhibited widely throughout the UK and internationally. He has been selected for eight consecutive editions of the Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair (now Imprint Art Fair), where he was recently included in the fair’s exclusive Ones to Watch selection for 2025.
In 2023, Stewart’s work was selected for the 16th Graphica Creativa Print Triennale in Finland, where the Jyväskylä Art Museum acquired one of his prints for its permanent collection. His work is also held in the Victoria & Albert Museum Print Collection.
Alongside his studio practice, Stewart has recently begun teaching gelliplate printmaking workshops, sharing the medium’s accessibility and versatility with new audiences. In 2025, he contributed a chapter on gel printing techniques to Printmaking: A Step-by-Step Studio Guide by Jenny Mason-Gunning, published by Herbert Press/Bloomsbury. His work and environmental projects were also recently featured in Devon Life magazine.
Before relocating to Devon, Stewart was a long-standing keyholder at East London Printmakers, where he remained a member for over a decade and led the organisation’s Copperfield Road studio build project following its move from London Fields. Earlier in his career, after graduating in Fine Art from the Surrey Institute of Art & Design at Farnham in 1994, he worked at Artichoke Print Workshop, specialising in photoetching and intaglio processes.
Stewart has exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, the National Original Print Exhibition and galleries throughout the UK. In 2018, he was awarded the Great Art Prize at the National Original Print Exhibition for his screenprint Alcala.
His current practice is based in Devon, where ongoing field research, walking, photography and a small-scale rewilding project continue to inform the evolving direction of The Tree Portraits and related landscape works.
©Stewart Taylor 2026