UNTITLED LETTERPRESS PROJECT
I took an induction into letterpress at the beginning of the year, and lost myself in the process. That is to say I spent days – weeks even – in the letterpress room, trying out the range of possibilities that this new (to me anyway) technology presents.
I tried printing; I tried embossing; I tried a combination of embossing and printing. I tried repetition, the same phrase printed over and over;
…It’s never too late It’s never too late It’s never too late….
When writing, my natural state is to pour it out and edit later, and in that way I can produce a thousand words really quickly, and come back to refine them the next day (unless it’s a blog post, which are better off posted immediately after being written), but when it comes to making my thoughts visual, the editing becomes even more dramatic, until often I’m down to three or four words.
Untitled Letterpress Project involves taking phrases, sentences, or combinations of words that I have had floating around for a while, but for which I could never find the appropriate medium. Indeed, it may be that letterpress is still not right for these ideas. We have a crit next week with Des Hughes, so we shall see.
I have three pieces. The first, It’s never too late, is printed in black ink, with the exception of the word never, which is embossed. The piece is a response to the old clichéd attitude of it being too late, the embossed ‘never’ implies a whisper – over the shoulder or in one’s own head – reminding us to never give up; that there is still time.
The second, The Blue Hour, is printed deep blue. Its origin is the old Norse term for dusk, and was intended to be presented alongside a stack of Cards (see previous post) which had the word Dusk printed on them, but actually, I think I prefer to leave the origin or meaning ambiguous.
The third, exquisite tenderness, is entirely embossed, and like the others, its materiality leads its reading in a certain direction.
In terms of presentation, I first strung them up with invisible thread, and had them kind of floating in front of the wall, on two tiny bulldog clips. I realised that the invisible thread became a feature in itself, and so resolved to remove it, and simply nail the small clips to the wall, and hang each piece from just one bulldog clip. This method seems to work; the clip is what it is, and no attempt is made to hide the way the pieces are hung, thereby minimising the attention drawn by the framing.
My thinking around these pieces is kind of just beginning to take shape, and I am still in the early stages of bringing my text down off the wall and into physical space, be that on pieces of MDF (see ELVIS LIVES post), or embossed into handmade paper. By all means comment and give me something else to think about.
