Meet the iconic printmakers that shaped half a century of the UK’s contemporary graphic art

Q&A with Steve Fachiri and Tracey Day of Harvey Lloyd Screens and Owen Gildersleeve, curator of 50 Years of Print.

It's Nice That (INT): To start – I’d love to hear a bit about your personal connections to Harvey Lloyd Studio, Owen? This isn’t the first show you’ve all worked on together – you previously collaborated with Steve and Tracey back in 2023 on your exhibition Like no Other. What did you learn about their practice from working with them so closely back then?

Owen Gildersleeve (OG): I initially found Steve and Tracey through Mr Bingo, who I used to share studios with in Dalston. I saw that he’d been doing so much beautiful work with them, and I had this idea for a project where I wanted to create a series of pieces using bold, quite Burrill-esque type overlaid with colour gradients. I thought screen printing would give it the handmade touch I wanted, so I reached out to them both in 2023.

What was so lovely about the first encounter was that they both immediately invited me to their studio to come and visit the space that they’ve had since 1986, which is just oozing with history and creativity. There’s old prints all over the walls, stacked floor-to-ceiling with used paint cans signed by Peter Blake and various others incredible artists. This is how these two often work with artists, in person, in their studio whenever they can.

Tracey Day (TD): With everybody we work with, we always say come down, come down! Actually working with artists one on one, and letting them have an input in what we do is the way we prefer to work. For Owen’s show Like No Other in 2023, we initially started off with small pieces and then we produced the larger prints when Owen came down to the studio – all three of us were involved in the project’s making.

OG: They took the idea I had and it made it even more fitting, which was incredible. And I think that’s the magic of what these two do, is that they take people’s creative visions to the next stage and that’s why this show that’s celebrating 50 years of their print practice is so exciting, so vibrant and so diverse. It’s just their ability to bring ideas to life, no matter what they are.

INT: It makes sense, then, that you’ve come to collaborate with one another again on this show celebrating five decades of Harvey Lloyd and of the contemporary graphic arts scene in the UK really! How did you come to lead the curation on this Owen and what was the process of bringing the show together like as a team?

TD:The show is actually all down to this man here [points at Owen], because when he was writing up a bio for his show Like No Other, crediting us for the printmaking, he read up a bit more about the studio and noticed we turned 50 in 2026.

OG: Steve’s initial reaction, when I called him and asked him, “What are you going to do for your 50th?” was “Oh, I don't know, probably go to the pub.” And I thought, maybe we could do something a bit better than that! So I immediately reached out to some of the big artists they had worked with such as Mr Bingo and Anthony Burrill who is really the seed of this whole show, in that he is the guy who found Harvey Lloyd in the Yellow Pages and did that initial set of prints with you, only to recommend Harvey Lloyd to every artist since!

Steve Fachiri (SF): Before we met Anthony, most of our clients were big London advertising agencies and design groups. We were working on accounts like Mastercard, Body Shop and other big brands. Artist print making was really where we wanted to go and things really steered that way because of Anthony and the circle of artists that surrounded him.

TD:In a strange kind of way, this lined up with when digital came in and much of that commercial print for advertising dried up – a lot of the work we were previously doing had gone digital, and it just so happened that that was the time that Anthony found us.

INT: I loved hearing the story from Anthony about when he was looking for a printer at the time, loads of people kind of turned him down because he wanted to print on – I think he was making beer mats? Yes, beer mats. Everyone was like: “Oh, we don’t want to bother with printing on more difficult materials.” But you guys were up for it straight away.

ST: We weren’t afraid of beer mats! We’d actually done a lot of them before. We’ve printed on all kinds of strange items over the last 50 years – we’ve even made prints that rust for a show at the V&A once.

INT: It’s so lovely to hear about how collaborative your process is and how much you work in ways that suit each particular artist best.

SF: Working with people like Owen and Anthony and Mr Bingo is great because they actually recognise that we have input, and they mention it as well, which is nice. That’s what’s great about artist printmaking – with advertising agencies, you were dealing with an art director, and often you’re completely anonymous. There’s not that closeness to it, you’re just a service provider.

OG: I think that’s what’s different with Harvey Lloyd. Working with Steve and Tracey creates a space for play. It’s a feeling I had when I first stepped through the studio door. When I’ve reached out to printers in the past, there’s such a lack of connection, you’re just sending your files, they’ll do the print and send it back and because of that, there’s no real space to explore something new.

INT: Bringing the show together must have been no mean feat. It must have been an extensive process to organise all these works – the Harvey Lloyd archive is huge. Can you give us an insight into how you brought everything together?

OG: We’ve been working on this show since August last year and for me, it just had to be really methodical. The first thing we were keen to do was just check with every artist to make sure they were happy to be involved. Steve and Tracey went through their whole archive, listing every single print that they had, all the artists, found each of the emails, and then I went through and contacted every single artist inviting them to the show. What was lovely is everyone came back not only saying, “Yes, I'd love to be involved”, but also saying really, really lovely things about Steve and Tracey and how much they loved working with them.

The biggest challenge was then working out what to put up where. It’s been a lot of planning, but we just wanted every artist to feel like they had their work celebrated and give a little bit more space to those artists who’ve done more works with Steve and Tracey. There’s been lots of back and forth – lots of times where these two called saying, “Oh, we found another drawer of prints!” It’s like... What? This wasn’t in the plan! We could have actually probably filled the same space again. It was a huge amount of work – just under 300 prints, so we couldn’t include everything.