Whilst making letterpress prints I made an accidental discovery of a process that produces unique and unpredictable prints using the printing roller. Rolling ink over the letter blocks leaves a negative image behind on the roller, and when the remaining ink from the roller is rolled out onto paper the resulting mono print is a linear matrix of the initial letters. If one colour is already on the letters when you roll over them with a different colour, the negative spaces become positives in the resulting two-tone print. This process is one similar to that of Eric Calderon’s “Typography Sphere”. Described as an “artist book”, Calderon’s sphere demonstrates how a process can be as much of a piece of artwork as the outcome. Calderon describes; “An artist's book. A book as an artwork, an artwork as a book. Inspired by the arts and craft movement as well as the Bauhaus functionalism, I created my own kind of art tool. The painter has his brush, the carpenter his hammer, I have my typographic ball. A book that writes itself. A piece in constant change.” The sphere is adorned with a number of cut out letters, that when inked up produce a matrix of overlapping lines with different combinations of the letters. The sphere itself is in essence the source material from which an infinite number of outcomes can be produced; no two prints from the sphere are ever the same. The more that the ball is rolled the more dense the resulting image. More layers of ink muddy the image, and the text becomes more difficult to read. No story or grammatical sentence is spelled out on the ball in the first place, therefore any words or structures that appear are coincidental. I find that these types of mono print are more interesting than original letterpress prints, as they are more in keeping with my aims of disrupting the reading process. I would like to take the kinetic process further with more rolled prints. Their unpredictable nature however makes it difficult to be sure if any one print will be very visible, or that all of the letters have been included. The nature of the roller also means that the line that is produced is split into blocks of decreasing levels of ink. Initially I have only used rollers with a small width so that they roll over the desired letters on the printing bed, but if I were to pursue this process any further I would like to see how a larger roller would work.
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AuthorThird Year BA Hons Fine Art student studying at Falmouth University Archives
April 2017
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