IN her dad’s greenhouse was a big pile of unglazed saucers. Pam Grimmond felt compelled to paint them, and so began an artist’s life that has flourished since those Stoke-on-Trent childhood beginnings.

In her tiny studio, off the High Street, in Markington, near Harrogate, Pam now specialises in creating limited-edition linocut prints, wood engravings and collages, her work inspired by shapes, forms and colours within rural, urban and coastal environments. “My dad, Cyril Doorbar [a Potteries name, incidentally] painted watercolours of birds and my aunts made ‘crafty’ things and were always busy with their hands, so I suppose my own art stemmed from that,” she says.

Her latest exhibition is running at The Café 68, in Gillygate, York, where she is sharing the walls with fellow printmaker Claire Shackleton - fresh out of Harrogate College.

It was at school that Pam’s talent was first spotted. “I had a lot of encouragement at secondary school, where I felt most at home in the art room, and I remember a teacher called Eric Degg saying, ‘You could make a living from art’. He must have seen something in me, though I didn’t make a living from art for ages,” she says.

Pam attended Burslem School of Art – as had Art Deco potter Clarice Cliff incidentally – and met her husband, jewellery maker Duncan, while studying in Birmingham to be an art teacher.

They married in 1975 and it was then that Pam moved to North Yorkshire with Yorkshireman Duncan. Theirs was a bohemian, “kind of hippy” lifestyle, Duncan doing his jewellery and Pam being part of Rhypum, a Ripon craft group that made and sold patchwork quilts and ceramics.

It was not until 1987 that she and Duncan moved to Markington, attracted as much by the outbuilding as the High Street house that had once been the home of the village bobby.

That compact yet Tardis-like two-floored former washhouse initially served as Duncan’s jewellery workshop, but now it is Pam’s studio, with a printing press and shower downstairs.

Access is by means of a secured ladder that requires careful negotiation, left leg first, with handles to hold. You are entering an inner sanctum. “I like to work in peace and quiet,” says Pam. It must be such a contrast to her 18 years of teaching art activities from 1990 when her own artistic endeavours had to take a back seat.

But now there has been no looking back; Pam now exhibits in 12 galleries nationwide, including in Ripley, Thirsk, Helmsley and Masham. Look out for her cover design on the next quarterly edition of Slightly Foxed too.

Pam settled on linocuts (as well as lemonwood or boxwood engraving). “I love the way the linocut transforms the initial crayon sketch into something completely different,”she said.

“You get that wow factor, where it surprises you.”

Now a member of the newly-formed North Yorkshire Printmakers Circle, Pam has developed a distinctive style, especially in the circle of light behind the birds in her linocuts - all created in a one-up, onedown former washhouse whose ladder is a stairway to an artistic haven.

Pam Grimmond and Claire Shackleton’s exhibition runs at The Café 68 until April 26.