Anne James visits an exhibition at the Jam Factory

This exhibition is composed of some 40 or so screen prints which are in the main of animals, with some featuring cars and boats. Tozer’s work is about interactions: between animals and their people, vehicles and their owners and both with the wider environment. The vehicle images focus on the journey, the nature of the destination is not relevant.

Meanwhile the animal portraits are about having a presence in the here and now. The result is a delightful quaint quirky and fictional folkloric narrative with a dream-like logic around the personas portrayed in each image.

Tozer takes meticulous care with colour and detail. He will erase parts of sketches and removes paint from the film he screen-prints with until he finds a satisfactory resolution. Meticulously he builds up his screen prints layer by layer, using film on film to create texture and depth, each layer adding a different colour or subtly altering the colour beneath. He describes his inspiration and methods as ‘rarely straightforward’.

All the prints are small and all justify detailed examination, both from a technical and an artistic perspective. The majority of his animal portraits end up as bears or cows. Many are inspired by an unlikely source: his pet dog whom he describes as ‘very comical’, and as having emotions that need interpreting via its body language, as animals have no words.

In Bringing up Baby, his dog has inspired both the maternal bear and the recumbent piglet she holds. The bear’s inscrutable face speaking at the same time of motherly compassion and of something more sinister, endorsed by her claws as she holds the baby. All watched by an unemotional wooden owl and set against an equally inscrutable sea. The exhibition is at the Jam Factory, Oxford. It is open daily and continues through until next month.

Hair Coat: An exhibition of prints by Simon Tozer
Jam Factory, Oxford
Until February 9
Tickets: 01865 244613 or thejamfactoryoxford.co.uk