Slowly Downward Manufactory is the official print studio and publisher of Stanley Donwood. We hand-make his limited-edition screenprints, one colour and one sheet at a time. Every print on this site was printed by us, signed and numbered by Stanley, and pressed with our seal.
Stanley Donwood is an English artist and writer, born in 1968.
He met Thom Yorke at Exeter University, where both were studying English literature and fine art. Since the My Iron Lung EP in 1994, Stanley has made all of Radiohead's artwork, working alongside Yorke on every album sleeve, poster and campaign since. The frozen landscapes of Kid A, the word-maps of Hail to the Thief and the ghostly image on A Moon Shaped Pool all started in his studio. That work has won him two Grammy Awards.
He has also been the official artist of Glastonbury Festival for more than twenty years, and he is a writer as much as an image-maker. His books include Slowly Downward: A Collection of Miserable Stories (2001), Household Worms (2011), Humor (Faber, 2014), Bad Island (2020) and Holloway (2012), made with Robert Macfarlane and Dan Richards.
Away from the records, his own work keeps returning to the same territory: forests, coastlines, maps of places that may not exist, and a quiet, persistent unease about where all of this is heading.
The way the images get made is often as strange as the images themselves. The cover of The Bends began with Stanley and Thom sneaking into a hospital basement in Oxford to film a resuscitation dummy, then photographing the footage off a television screen. OK Computer was made on a computer with one rule: no undo button. The snowfields of Kid A were painted over something darker, prompted by war photographs from the former Yugoslavia. The linocut for Thom's solo album The Eraser, a lone figure facing a great wave as it swallows London, grew out of the Boscastle flood, and The King of Limbs came from the ancient oaks of Wistman's Wood on Dartmoor.
In recent years the collaboration has moved closer still. Since 2021 Stanley and Thom have painted side by side on the same canvas, first for the covers of The Smile, producing the brightest, most hopeful work of their partnership. In 2025 the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford marked thirty years of that partnership with This Is What You Get, the first major museum exhibition of their visual art, bringing together more than 180 paintings, prints, notebooks and drawings. Alongside it, Stanley continues to exhibit his own work in London and around the world, often sharp-edged and satirical, in a tradition that critics have traced back to Hogarth.
We take our name from Stanley's first book of stories, and from the website he has kept, under the same name, since the early days of the internet. Stanley began making screenprints in 2004 in his studio's in Bath, UK
Everything we publish is a hand-pulled screenprint, sometimes by Stanley Donwood himself; each colour is a separate screen and a separate pass of the squeegee, so a print like Worthy Forest means twenty-one layers of ink laid down by hand, one after another.
We print on Archival papers. We use Somerset paper from St Cuthbert's Mill. Every print is:
We also print and publish Stanley's official Glastonbury Festival editions.
This shop is where we release our editions first. When you buy here, you buy directly from Stanley Donwood's own studio that prints the work, and each print comes with its certificate of authenticity packed alongside it.
Editions are small and, once sold, they are gone. If you'd like to hear about new releases before they appear, join the mailing list. Galleries are welcome to get in touch with us directly.
archive@slowlydownward.co.uk
