Elspeth Lamb

Elspeth Lamb is a Scottish printmaker and an elected academician of the Royal Scottish Academy. Lithography has been her principal medium, but she also works in mokuhanga, the Japanese water-based woodblock method, and it is largely through that practice that she has become part of the international mokuhanga community.

Lamb trained at Glasgow School of Art before undertaking postgraduate study in printmaking at Manchester Metropolitan University and further study at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford. An early member of Glasgow Print Studio, she went on to teach at Edinburgh College of Art for twenty-one years, latterly as head of its printmaking department, before giving up her academic post in 1999 to concentrate on her own work and on teaching workshops.

Her engagement with Japanese woodblock printing began in 2000, when she took part in an international residency in the village of Nagasawa, Japan, where she learned the mokuhanga method; she later returned to study traditional Japanese papermaking. That experience informed her book Papermaking for Printmakers, published in 2006.

Lamb exhibited in the Europe and Africa section of the juried exhibition at the 2024 International Mokuhanga Conference in Echizen, Japan, showing Food Chain (Lost words series), a mokuhanga and silkscreen work printed on kozo, rush, and bracken paper. Echizen, the host region, is renowned for its centuries-old washi papermaking traditions, and the juried exhibition gathered around 140 prints by artists from more than a dozen countries across the Americas, Asia, Europe, and Oceania. The European grouping ranged from the British Isles through Scandinavia to Eastern Europe, reflecting the broad geographic spread of contemporary mokuhanga.

The United Kingdom has been a consistent presence in the international mokuhanga community, supported by a strong domestic printmaking culture and educational institutions that have incorporated water-based techniques into their programmes. Scotland's own printmaking heritage in etching, lithography, and screenprinting provides a context of technical excellence for practitioners such as Lamb, whose international exhibition activity helps connect the Scottish printmaking community to the wider mokuhanga network.