Mashka’s Marvellous Menagerie - vibrant and characterful anthropomorphic animals lovingly screen-printed by hand.

Anthropomorphism has ancient roots as a literary and artistic device.

Intrigued by these hybrid forms which resonate throughout history and across cultures; artist Kerry Eggleton has created contemporary characters in the style of a Victorian engraving, harking back to the golden age of the British circus.

Roll up! Roll up for Mashka’s Marvellous Menagerie!

About Founder Kerry Eggleton

Kerry had a modest start to life, growing up on a council estate, born youngest of 5 to working class parents. The first of her family to attend college or university she graduated with a BA Hons Graphic Design degree at the University of Brighton. Lamentably enslaved by debt from her education, Kerry reluctantly entered the world of Investment Banking, leaving behind her creative aspirations. But despite a successful 8 year career in finance she never gave up on her ambition. By creating and studying in her spare time she honed her skills and refined her creative perspective, discovering a love for the technique of screen-printing. 2010 marked a joyful year for Kerry as she finally escaped the corporate grind, re-launching her career as an artist and has never looked back since. Now with numerous high profile art exhibitions and commissions under her belt she runs her own art business whilst being a very proud mummy to her 2 year old son Jack.

Kerry starts out with a character style in mind and scours charity shops or borrows the clothing required. She then photographs a model wearing these in various stances fitting for the character, which start to bring it to life. After searching for the right animal image with the required gazeand angle, it is digitally coalesced with the body shot. Once Kerry is happy that her creation’s character is realized (this can take a while), she redraws the image into separate colour layers. She then manually develops each layer onto screens using light sensitive emulsion and an exposure unit. The process is similar to developing a photograph, but working with positives rather than negatives. Once the screens are ready, Kerry carefully mixes each ink colour by hand and then hand pulls it through the individual screens, layer by layer, to recreate the images manually. The screen-printing process can be hard work, as each of her colour pieces requires at least 20 pulls and plenty of elbow grease to keep washing out the multiple screens, but it yields incredibly satisfying results. Through this process Kerry transforms the initial precision of the digital image into a vibrant piece of art with wonderful ink density. As the prints are lovingly hand created, each is unique (although part of an edition), offering more charm and individuality than digitally created prints; making them more prized and collectable artworks as a result.