Thelma Sykes combines a passion for printmaking with long experience as a field naturalist to create expressive images in linocut and woodcut. Her book illustrations for the British Trust for Ornithology enliven several standard works of reference.

A member of the Society of Wildlife Artists, Thelma exhibits with them at the Mall Galleries in London. She is a founder member of Nature in Art, the Museum of International Wildlife Art, and has work in their permanent collection. She has exhibited with other printmakers, through the Printmakers Council, in touring exhibitions of the Society of Wood Engravers, and was represented in the exhibition of Western printmakers at Chong Qing, China as part of the Millennium International Printmaking Festival. Her work is in public Museums in the UK and in China.

"My linocuts often celebrate wildfowl and wading birds as my home is close to an estuary and that estuary is close to my heart. The repeating patterns in nature inform the rhythms of my work; rippled water, reflections that mirror and transform the birds above them. Such patterns are dynamic; they move the eye across the picture space

'The tools of printmaking have their own voice. I like the visual energy generated by freely drawn tool marks. I might manipulate the ink on the block before printing to achieve soft-edged forms that counter the crisp cut of the gouge, or the work may ask for a plywood block, or a block of well-grained pine, to give textural contrast to the flat colour that is the characteristic of lino.

'For me, printmaking is a mix of discipline and freedom: it needs control coupled with a willingness to abandon caution and risk all. I use two or three blocks for most prints, but each is cut, printed and then cut again, the blocks being gradually destroyed as the print progresses. Printmakers call this technique the suicide method with good reason - there is no going back. It is scary stuff and fuels creativity at the expense of the nerves. Perhaps printmaking is a medium that you do not master - at best it is a partnership. The act of printmaking adds its own alchemy to the work and my image is the better for that.'"