Print-maker Catherine Sutcliffe-Fuller has been drawing inspiration from the land below where a shopping centre now stands, reports CHARLES HUTCHINSON.

THE land at what has now become the home of York's John Lewis store has been part of print-maker Catherine Sutcliffe-Fuller's life since childhood.

"I grew up nearby and I used to take ponies to the fields and pick strawberries there as a child, when it wasn't accessible to the public but was owned by a family I knew," she says. "I used to go pig-feeding with them and harvesting with them, so I was very lucky that I had access to that landscape and had a different experience from other children, who didn't have that access.

"Now, after the work began on the Monks Cross II site last year, I'm interested in how we view that land now and how we process it, as I now depict these fields in the next stage of their life."

The results of Catherine's project to chart the changing face of Monks Cross form the subject of her new exhibition, Land With Opportunity, at the New School House Gallery, in Peasholme Green, York, until October 25.

For the first time, she is presenting a series of striking new works that document the changing "edgelands" of a city during the construction of an out-of-town shopping centre.

Since work started at the site last year, Catherine has been charting the transformation to reflect her interest in the shift on the land over the years "from one economic viability to another", as she puts it.

"The Monks Cross site used to be called Pigeon CoteFarm, and I started recording the site in my art possibly 20 years ago," says Catherine.

"I recognised there was change in the offing and it was important to document it. It's important because it speaks of our changing needs and of what the consumer expects of the landscape."

As the fencing sprang up around derelict farm buildings and work began on the displacement of 300 newts, the artist became fascinated by the processes unfolding before her, and the changes being wrought on the landscape in this newest tangle between man and nature.

Others may have deemed the expanding spread of York's shopping parks as "controversial", but Catherine chooses not to take sides, which may surprise you, given the perceived role of artists as outsiders commenting through their artwork.

"From an artist's point of view, I'm interested in the history, the past and present of the landscape, as I'm driven to produce work as an honest reflection of our current activity," she says. "I don't look at it politically. It is what it is."

Catherine's penetrating artistic eye lifts the veil on the everyday, the banal, to reveal a darker, more disturbing reality, suggests New School House co-director Robert Teed.

"She can see ‘the skull beneath the skin’, taking quite ordinary, even prosaic, landscapes – some fenced-off farm buildings, a single oak tree, two concrete mixer lorries – and rendering them in wholly new and strangely powerful ways," he says.

Curator and co-director Paula Jackson says Catherine has "an intelligent eye": "She can take a subject as complex as this development and render it without being polemical or propogandist. Instead, being sympathetic to both the landscape and the construction is a remarkable achievement."

As a fine art printmaker, Catherine follows in the tradition of John Piper and Norman Ackroyd, pushing the medium of print to its limits to realise her artistic vision. Printmaking is a laborious and time-consuming activity., and most of her prints consist of at least two plates – one a metal etching plate, the other a linocut – which layer contrasts in line and tone on to the finished print.

Creating the plates takes weeks, and then comes the challenge of printing: registering each plate precisely so that the lines converge.

"I'll discard many attempts in the process of making a single print," she says. "In general, I'll average one print a month."

Hence the main body of work in Land With Opportunity consists of 12 prints produced between 2013 and 2014. Each print is limited to a very exclusive edition of 12 and a portfolio of the full suite of 12 prints is also available in a presentation box .

Summarising her continuing project, Catherine says: "The theme of the work is the change in the landscape but what I'm enjoying in that journey is learning about everything that is involved, such as the planting schemes on the site.

"I don't want to steer people's responses. I want them to look at the work, see things, ask questions, and I want to encourage conversations that aren't aggressive."

Catherine Sutcliffe-Fuller is one of four artists selected for a residency in 2014 as part of PH1: Artists in Place by curators Paula Jackson and Robert Teed of the New School House Gallery in York. Over six months, she will document the construction on Peasholme Green of the new landmark Hiscox building.