2025 in review: DCA Print Studio

Paisley born artist Anya Gallaccio was commissioned by the Government Art Collection to create a print for The Robson Orr TenTen Award 2025. This project works with prominent UK artists to create limited edition prints which enter the Government Art Collection and find homes in diplomatic buildings around the world. 

We were delighted to welcome her into the studio, where her experimental approach resulted in the print eight hours of whale song, 2025. Creating this visualisation of whale song involved many different processes, from vibrations of the sounds being captured by powder moving on acrylic and then scanning the resulting patterns, to printing from laser engraved plywood sheets and then also engraving into the finished prints. 

The end result is a layered and textured image, with each print in the edition being unique. The finished print was unveiled in London at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and Frieze Art Fair. The process of creating the print was captured a Making the Print film by Government Art Collection - watch it below.

Artist Ilana Halperin has been working with us in the studio for nearly 20 years, bringing lots of exciting projects our way. This year we worked with her on a number of pieces for An Anatomy of Mars, an exhibition in Iceland curated by Claire Cousins and Catriona McAra which runs until 23 December 2025.

This work involved engraving drawings into alabaster and inking them with a mix of soil and ochre. We also assisted in printing We are All Extremophiles, an etching that was printed with hand made ink composed of a core sample of soil from the farm of Scottish geologist and "Father of Modern Geology" James Hutton. 

And we've continued to put our laser cutter to work as we've been engraving on Scottish marble as part of Halperin's preparations for her upcoming exhibition at Fruitmarket, which runs from 28 February 2026. We can't wait to share more about this process in the new year.

To mark their 25th anniversary, Cove Park commissioned artist, photographer and DJ Matthew Arthur Williams to create a limited edition print in our studio. We’ve worked with both Matthew and Cove Park in the past (Matthew’s solo exhibition, Soon Come, filled DCA galleries from December 2022 to March 2023), so this was a great opportunity to collaborate again.

The image for the print, titled 77°F, originates from 2022 when Williams was in Northumberland to photograph the artist and photographer Ingrid Pollard (another artist we worked with this year) for a feature in The Observer. We screen printed it onto Fabriano Rosaspina paper, and then each print was individually submerged in a bath of hibiscus tea. This dyed the paper w which changed as it dried, a process that we captured in the film below.  The print is available to buy from Cove Park here.

This year we welcomed exhibiting artist Lauren Gault for a production residency, during which she made exciting new works for her exhibition bone stone voice alone. 

She brought her sculpture background to printmaking, creating a large, experimental wall piece, printed using stone ‘slurry’ (a biproduct of stone manufacturing processes) as well as an intricate set of Japanese Takuhon prints, whose ghostly 3d forms take the shape of fossils, bones and stones. You can see the results of this work in the galleries now - we're so happy with how they turned out.

We also worked with her on a new DCA Edition. GOODBYE (deinos sauros) features a collage of two historical works and used the same experimental technique as her wall piece in the gallery of printing with stone slurry.