The print room has recently acquired a small collection of letter blocks for letterpress printing. It is a second hand set that has seen a lot of wear and tear which has resulted in there being very few fonts with only a handful of each letter. The additional blocks required to hold all of the letters in place are also missing so it is a matter of using offcuts of wood to create a manageable surface to ink up and print from.
To test out the process I recreated one of my manifestos. Its instructive tone lead me to use black and red inks initially, which gives the print a striking appearance, although similar to a design to be used as a sign on a wall as opposed to a more aesthetic purpose. Although these initial prints were done on white printing wove there is the potential to combine this process with other processes to build up a more textured or busy surface, which could be the solution to making the print seem less design orientated.
I also tried over-printing, again using red and black inks to create a distinction between two words; in this case the commands DO and DON’T. I wanted to see if there was a possibility of opposing words coming together to create a single merged body, where the words have to be extracted from the whole in order to be understood.
The process of overprinting is tricky to be able to get the letters to lie over the top of each other exactly; this is proven in most of my attempts where a distinction between the two words is more obvious than intended. The composition however works better as a resolved print because of the motif that is created, and the process of unpicking the individual letters that takes place to be able to “read” the image.
However there are other examples of work out there that use this overlay technique but the processes used to create the work mean that another dimension is explored in the viewing experience. James Clar’s light works use filters to block out certain parts of long florescent tubes, whilst exposing other parts so that they light up the wall behind them.
“Lover’s Quarrel” filters out the letters to spell “leave” on the fronts of the tubes, whilst the backs of the tubes have had other parts exposed so that it reads “don’t” backwards. At first the different lights combine to create one hazy colour, yet on closer inspection it is possible to see the two words separately. The same technique has been used on other works including “The End” and “Focus”, where the back of the light tubes are just as integral to the work as the front, each spelling out an additional part of the piece.
Sara Morawetz creates lenticular prints, where movement is necessary to reveal the other words present in the work. These prints demonstrate the categorisation of time in the words that are selected, for example “today” and “tomorrow”, or “beginning”, “middle”, and “end”. The movement required to fully experience the work adds another kind of time, and demonstrates the movement of time as the words merge into the next.
I feel that if I were to pursue the process of letterpress printmaking I would first need to identify a means of how to present the resulting print so that it does not appear flat, as it is clearly possible to use text in a way that is more effective at activating the space it’s presented in.
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AuthorThird Year BA Hons Fine Art student studying at Falmouth University Archives
April 2017
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