This year’s print exhibition at Watts Contemporary Gallery is guaranteed to bring a smile to your face. All the works have been selected to inspire a feel-good factor, and to find the positives in life.

One of the contributing artists, woodcut printer John Pedder describes what drives him to create his work.

It was a massive eureka moment when I took up woodcut printing. It allowed me to use decades of craft skills of various sorts to realise a life-long search for a primitive mark. I’ve always loved to draw and to make things. I have worked as a theatre set builder, a musician, and an antiques dealer. But even when I’ve been doing other things, I have always considered myself an artist.

I’m originally from Liverpool and now live in Sheffield, having moved straight after finishing art college in Hull. After many years of not fully committing to an art life, I am now in a position where I have my own studio space and I can fully commit to what I’ve always known I should be doing.

Woodcut really slowed my creative process down, so that a mark made in seconds in a sketch book could be fully investigated without falling into the trap of sophistication that years of experience can often bring. I do use digital drawing an awful lot because a finger or iPencil on an iPad does a surprisingly good imitation of a knife carving wood. But eventually you need to get into the real world of splinters, dust, and thick ink if you want some honesty and authenticity.

In my work I set out to edit everything down to what is essential. My work is very simple in its resolution, but a huge amount of trial and error has gone into deciding what stays in the final version. When everything is possible you need to find out what is important to you. Printmaking for me is a way of limiting my options so that I can distil what is vital. It slows me down so that I can properly appreciate the journey’s detail.

My subject matter tends to deal with the nobility of life: finding the honour and goodness in a person, a deed, a situation, coupled with a large helping of humour. My prints provide an aesthetic journey using craft stills to try and make sense of an increasingly bewildering world. With a few laughs along the way, what is not to like?