Alastair Keady

Alastair Keady is a designer and design educator with a background in visual communication, having studied at the National College of Art and Design (NCAD) and the Royal College of Art. Deeply engaged with the physicality and process of printmaking, he began his career working in letterpress before returning to screen printing in 2017.

Keady’s printmaking practice is defined by a hard-edged abstraction, exploring the visual tension between the square and the circle, and the relationship between two points. His image-making techniques sometimes question, disrupt, or subvert established visual norms.

While his professional design work often leans towards figurative illustration, his personal print practice serves as a deliberate counterpoint—entirely abstract, materially rich, and experimental. He frequently incorporates specialized finishes such as gilding, bronzing, powder pigments, diamond dust, as well as metallic and fluorescent inks. Conventional halftone or CMYK processes are largely avoided in favour of more tactile and unconventional approaches. His film positives are created either in-house, repurposed from inkjet prints and PrintFab, or produced manually using brushes, ink rollers, and tracing paper. Smaller pieces often involve computer-generated artwork, whereas larger works typically include layered, screen-printed monoprints.