Janne Malmros was born in Denmark but now lives and works in the UK. Print – etching, screenprint, woodcut – is her primary medium but she is not a printmaker in the conventional sense. In much of her work the printed element is the starting point for a three- dimensional work in which she plays variously with volume, space, surface and shadow. Much of her work involves explorations of the idea of repetition – which is of course fundamental to printmaking – but sometimes the repetition occurs within the confines of a single piece (as in the Truncated Element series, which employs versions of a repeating pattern) or it mutates from one piece to the next; sometimes the repetition is inherent in the form – for example wallpaper. Malmros often complicates the idea of the repeat by cutting and folding areas of the print to negotiate between two and three dimensions in a single work. In this wallpaper piece from the Truncated Element series there is complex interplay between negative and positive (black / white, printed areas / cut-out spaces) as well as subtle use of shadow and reflection.

This wallpaper is one of four works by Malmros selected for inclusion in Surface Noise , a show of contemporary printmaking at Jerwood Space (19 January – 27 February 2011), selected by V&A print curator Gill Saunders.