1 00:00:10,530 --> 00:00:13,860 OK. Good evening, thank you all for coming in, first of all, 2 00:00:13,860 --> 00:00:20,070 and thank you to the to the Bodleian for hosting me here as Princeton residents just nearing the end of my time. 3 00:00:20,070 --> 00:00:24,910 Here I go home this weekend and it's been an amazing experience. 4 00:00:24,910 --> 00:00:42,480 So thank you to everybody here. So I came here to produce a print and book the same print in a print version and a book version, 5 00:00:42,480 --> 00:00:48,000 which was finished this week, so I'm relieved it's here. 6 00:00:48,000 --> 00:00:58,330 There's a copy of the front here as well. So you get an idea of the scale of the scale and if you like, feel free to come and look later. 7 00:00:58,330 --> 00:01:04,230 Just wait while some more people come in. Oh, you're welcome. 8 00:01:04,230 --> 00:01:17,500 We've just started. So you've not missed the. I'll be talking more about this later in the talk. 9 00:01:17,500 --> 00:01:23,110 I'm going to talk for about 40 minutes a link and then be space if anyone's got any questions. 10 00:01:23,110 --> 00:01:30,310 Please. And also, I've brought a small selection of my work, smaller work out, which is from here. 11 00:01:30,310 --> 00:01:35,650 You're welcome to come and take a look. They're all handling copies, so please take a look and let Alex in as well. 12 00:01:35,650 --> 00:01:40,900 We're going to go over to the press afterwards as well. We'll have some more work out and feel free to talk. 13 00:01:40,900 --> 00:01:50,180 I'm happy to answer questions if I can. If I can't, I'll make up some excuse. 14 00:01:50,180 --> 00:01:57,650 Very small introduction to myself, I'm a visual artist working with print, language and geography. 15 00:01:57,650 --> 00:02:05,330 I'm interested in how we experience place and how we describe place and how we can represent that. 16 00:02:05,330 --> 00:02:14,060 And I work primarily with less oppressed Brinson. And given that it was mainly an industrial process that's changed somewhat over the last 50 years. 17 00:02:14,060 --> 00:02:20,600 You could call that a decline. Some people think the resurgence as well. We can have that conversation. 18 00:02:20,600 --> 00:02:27,530 But because of that, I'm interested in where the multiple meets the unique and where the ephemeral meets the archival. 19 00:02:27,530 --> 00:02:32,340 And hopefully some of that will become clear as I show you some images of my own work and other work as well. 20 00:02:32,340 --> 00:02:39,140 Other artists work. These are some starting points. 21 00:02:39,140 --> 00:03:32,410 I'm going to leave you with those four minutes to read them through while I rearranged something. 22 00:03:32,410 --> 00:03:46,560 Mm hmm. OK. 23 00:03:46,560 --> 00:03:59,040 I want to talk to you about how we can read and strategies for reading if you like, the talk will be from my own perspective as a practising artist. 24 00:03:59,040 --> 00:04:03,510 And I'd like to do that by looking at how a small cross-section of artists work. 25 00:04:03,510 --> 00:04:09,930 And in some ways, this is from my own research. All the artists I'm going to introduce you to, or you may well be aware of. 26 00:04:09,930 --> 00:04:15,720 Some of them already are artists who I've been intrigued by over a sustained period of time and 27 00:04:15,720 --> 00:04:25,430 whose thinking is either fed into my own work or where I feel like there's some shared concerns. 28 00:04:25,430 --> 00:04:30,290 You could say that ninety nine percent of work isn't made in a vacuum. 29 00:04:30,290 --> 00:04:37,520 We work within a round or perhaps even against a history and the present and the response to it. 30 00:04:37,520 --> 00:04:42,800 If you like, there's a huge amount of history, obviously here at the Bosnian and in the press room. 31 00:04:42,800 --> 00:04:49,490 Well, where I've been working for the past month, there are multiple contexts and situations. 32 00:04:49,490 --> 00:04:57,200 The logical thing to do would perhaps be to present this work from these artists in a chronological linear fashion. 33 00:04:57,200 --> 00:05:06,480 So I'm not going to do that instead of group to work into themes. 34 00:05:06,480 --> 00:05:12,240 Well, I want to show you some of the strategies and devices that these artists have used in the hope that 35 00:05:12,240 --> 00:05:19,470 it will highlight our own strategies that we can use for reading and interpreting some of this work. 36 00:05:19,470 --> 00:05:27,900 And these themes here naturally cross over and bleed into each other, as will become obvious through the talk. 37 00:05:27,900 --> 00:05:32,820 And I also think it's very helpful to think of them as starting points, not end points. 38 00:05:32,820 --> 00:05:50,850 OK. So the first thing that I'm picking out is about sex and about sex and modified, generated, appropriated. 39 00:05:50,850 --> 00:06:04,620 Marion Dargis is an art artist working in Philadelphia, contemporary. 40 00:06:04,620 --> 00:06:13,950 And this is a book that she produced a handful of years ago with another artist called Leah Macken. 41 00:06:13,950 --> 00:06:24,720 Ultra says it's a collaboration about place systems and chance the text is generated 42 00:06:24,720 --> 00:06:32,160 using optical character recognition and Google Translate using them as chance operations, 43 00:06:32,160 --> 00:06:41,740 and its actual original source is Sigmund Freud Zesa, the mystic writing part. 44 00:06:41,740 --> 00:06:53,420 These are just the selection of the pages, some of the text ripped through the book, which is something else, will come back to repetition. 45 00:06:53,420 --> 00:07:01,970 And interacts with the imagery. And no two books are exactly the same. 46 00:07:01,970 --> 00:07:08,150 Which is an interesting argument against perhaps the idea of the multiple. 47 00:07:08,150 --> 00:07:17,490 And in addition, size where each copy has to be the same. None of these are the same. 48 00:07:17,490 --> 00:07:25,440 Just a brief note of put dimensions here. It's a fascination of the art world I know to have dimensions on everything. 49 00:07:25,440 --> 00:07:29,760 Some of them are an inch as some of them are in centimetres. Some of them have got both. 50 00:07:29,760 --> 00:07:33,690 OK, so if it's important to you, you'll get a sense of it. 51 00:07:33,690 --> 00:07:40,680 Hopefully from that. I like to think it's reflective of less press printing in that it works in both inches and centimetres. 52 00:07:40,680 --> 00:07:45,300 People around the world use both those different systems, and we have to try and interact with each other. 53 00:07:45,300 --> 00:07:53,010 So when I go to Milan to print or when I go to Belgium to print, they're all talking in centimetres with Typekit and I'm still thinking in inches. 54 00:07:53,010 --> 00:07:59,940 But when I was a kid growing up, my parents worked in inches and school in centimetres, so I can't do either of them very well. 55 00:07:59,940 --> 00:08:09,620 That's where I ended up. So there's a little bit of scale because I thought it might be useful. 56 00:08:09,620 --> 00:08:17,840 So if we're talking about modification of text, I want to show you this work by an artist called Ken Campbell. 57 00:08:17,840 --> 00:08:27,500 I have this catalogue here of his work, which I'm going to put out on the table afterwards, and you feel free to take a look. 58 00:08:27,500 --> 00:08:35,300 But he's very interested as an artist because he started life as a composer in the 1950s. 59 00:08:35,300 --> 00:08:42,650 Born in the east end of London, and then he went to London School of Printing and learnt graphic design and broke his apprenticeship, 60 00:08:42,650 --> 00:08:50,060 in fact, to learn through graphic design before going on later in his career to create artist books. 61 00:08:50,060 --> 00:08:53,330 And this is a collection of 20 of them. 62 00:08:53,330 --> 00:09:04,820 But this is a really interesting book called Father's Garden, and I just want to read you what he says about this work. 63 00:09:04,820 --> 00:09:13,360 If I show you a couple of images, some of the things that are happening become clear. 64 00:09:13,360 --> 00:09:19,300 Rabbi Luria of Sfard prayed at dawn in his garden when he thought the world was innocent of all sin. 65 00:09:19,300 --> 00:09:25,630 This book carries a poem about a father's garden that is used as a repeating image of a garden of exits and entrances. 66 00:09:25,630 --> 00:09:31,930 A garden of furrows of articulated alphabet from which much may grow to sacred garden. 67 00:09:31,930 --> 00:09:37,870 A garden representing Jerusalem, a garden in which our fathers juice flows everywhere. 68 00:09:37,870 --> 00:09:44,080 The poem is revealed on a page within the page a plot within a plot. 69 00:09:44,080 --> 00:09:48,460 The exits and entrances are eight possible typographic portals to that page. 70 00:09:48,460 --> 00:09:55,360 I asked a friend how many gates the to the material Jerusalem while setting aside under my breath, let there be eight. 71 00:09:55,360 --> 00:10:00,640 Lucky man, he said later. There are seven on one they don't talk about. 72 00:10:00,640 --> 00:10:07,060 As each cycle of the book is completed, a flowering made of decorative typographic elements occurs at the gates. 73 00:10:07,060 --> 00:10:10,240 The flowering is inspired by the design of Islamic books in the British Museum, 74 00:10:10,240 --> 00:10:15,040 and each carries successfully the symbols of the last of the three religions of the book. 75 00:10:15,040 --> 00:10:21,470 The typographic rules are used as bars to represent a close to the gates of the city. 76 00:10:21,470 --> 00:10:24,950 Where it gets more practical and what's going on in the book is that each line of the 77 00:10:24,950 --> 00:10:30,780 poem is randomly shown when typographic led rules are removed and set aside on the page. 78 00:10:30,780 --> 00:10:37,800 So some of this is happening here. The line may then be seen as a happy representation of fruitful growth, 79 00:10:37,800 --> 00:10:42,740 flat soldiers of colour represented in the garden and seem to walk playfully about. 80 00:10:42,740 --> 00:10:50,690 The type that the poem is set in changes progressively from a brutal sans serif bold into a graceful italic serif until towards 81 00:10:50,690 --> 00:10:59,480 the notion that loosening of the strictly laid out and savagely managed garden of my father might yet produce happier fruit. 82 00:10:59,480 --> 00:11:07,690 My father, despite his rigour, found everything that you planted in the ground spontaneously blossomed intentionally or not. 83 00:11:07,690 --> 00:11:12,430 So through the book, that's what happens. That's how the text is modified. 84 00:11:12,430 --> 00:11:16,780 It's the same text. It changes with how visible and readable it is. 85 00:11:16,780 --> 00:11:30,580 And as Ken says, Glen Campbell says, with the typeface indicating the feeling that it's happening. 86 00:11:30,580 --> 00:11:39,790 This is something I've thought about a lot recently, and this is a new piece of work I'm making started this awesome will be a series of 87 00:11:39,790 --> 00:11:49,690 four books broadly looking at elements close to where I live and where my studio is. 88 00:11:49,690 --> 00:11:57,550 And the dangers of those elements might present all the dangers that we might present to those elements of this book, 89 00:11:57,550 --> 00:12:02,840 is this a proof binding of it just to the front, if you want to take a look? 90 00:12:02,840 --> 00:12:06,470 But something similar happens where the text begins in the book, 91 00:12:06,470 --> 00:12:12,500 completely obscured and gradually becomes more readable until the last page of the book. 92 00:12:12,500 --> 00:12:23,900 The full short poem, shall we call it, is revealed. 93 00:12:23,900 --> 00:12:45,370 The second theme on talks about is working in series. And I'm going to show you a little more of my work here to illustrate this. 94 00:12:45,370 --> 00:12:54,120 I did initially. So the piece that actually came here to make is part of a tax landscape series. 95 00:12:54,120 --> 00:13:00,060 This is the fourth iteration of it that made here. I started it two years ago with this print. 96 00:13:00,060 --> 00:13:07,120 It was made at Wells Book Art Centre, New York State. And I had a very simple idea for it. 97 00:13:07,120 --> 00:13:18,770 Which was could you represent a landscape and experience of being in a landscape topographically through using tax? 98 00:13:18,770 --> 00:13:29,270 So in some ways, this whole series. Is generated from the experience of being in the place, so my writings about being in that place. 99 00:13:29,270 --> 00:13:32,910 Conversations. Oral histories. 100 00:13:32,910 --> 00:13:39,990 One of my favourite aspects of it is when I'm talking to people who come to visit me when I'm on the residency and I say some of the work, 101 00:13:39,990 --> 00:13:43,620 some of the text and I come from conversations they get because they get edited, 102 00:13:43,620 --> 00:13:48,300 they get moved around and there's a meta moment there where I'm talking to somebody and sometimes 103 00:13:48,300 --> 00:13:52,050 they realise that the conversation that happened with me might end up somewhere in the print. 104 00:13:52,050 --> 00:13:58,230 And sometimes they do a very good job of not knowing that at all. Maybe they do, and they're not showing me. 105 00:13:58,230 --> 00:14:03,480 But those are where the tax came from. I also take a lot of photographs while I'm on the residency. 106 00:14:03,480 --> 00:14:09,930 And around the city or around the place, and I'm looking for colours, patterns, textures, 107 00:14:09,930 --> 00:14:16,710 and the final arrangement often is some representation of that place, possibly as a landscape. 108 00:14:16,710 --> 00:14:25,730 Elements of that landscape. This was one night on a residency in rural borders of Scotland. 109 00:14:25,730 --> 00:14:31,830 This was one made in urban downtown Cleveland, Ohio. 110 00:14:31,830 --> 00:14:37,520 And this is the one made here, which in the end. 111 00:14:37,520 --> 00:14:41,990 Owes a lot more to maps than the previous iterations in the series have, 112 00:14:41,990 --> 00:14:49,370 because perhaps because I saw the Map exhibition here, I'm one of the first days I was here and that stuck with me. 113 00:14:49,370 --> 00:14:53,560 And hopefully there'll be some elements in there that you can recognise from Oxford. 114 00:14:53,560 --> 00:15:03,230 Some of the curves, some of the rivers that move through the city. So this is the fourth in that series. 115 00:15:03,230 --> 00:15:12,620 My plan is supposed to be 10. And then I'll stop. 116 00:15:12,620 --> 00:15:19,040 Also looking in series, then this is a German artist from the city of Rostock, working now called Petra. 117 00:15:19,040 --> 00:15:25,810 Petra Schulz of Auguste. A series of circle the back side of the universe. 118 00:15:25,810 --> 00:15:29,200 There's elements of this that will appear in a later theme as well. 119 00:15:29,200 --> 00:15:33,030 Printing from different materials and lots of press. 120 00:15:33,030 --> 00:15:55,540 But if I I'll skip through this series and then go back to the beginning and you'll see what's happening. 121 00:15:55,540 --> 00:16:01,390 So the first point she makes in each is the back of the letters. 122 00:16:01,390 --> 00:16:10,560 Very simple technique, but really interesting and revealing. And to quote where she says she prints the backs of the letters first, 123 00:16:10,560 --> 00:16:15,150 because of the geometric shape and the constructions that can be created from them, 124 00:16:15,150 --> 00:16:32,590 they often have a beautiful structure and I notice that they often look like galaxies. So my understanding is that she doesn't compose these. 125 00:16:32,590 --> 00:16:43,630 With the letters or the rule on psychographic elements, first, she looks at the back when she's printed, but she turns them over and prints the from. 126 00:16:43,630 --> 00:16:52,350 And what's interesting to me is how it builds up as a series. How one leads on to the next and the next and the next and how they. 127 00:16:52,350 --> 00:17:06,300 Amplify each other to me. This is contemporary artist based in Chicago with the such. 128 00:17:06,300 --> 00:17:12,660 And a series of hers called Electric Biology. Two examples of this series here. 129 00:17:12,660 --> 00:17:25,780 Over 40 in the series. And quoting from her, she says, inspired by the most complex organ in invertebrate body, the brain. 130 00:17:25,780 --> 00:17:33,320 Information from the Sense Organs is collected in the brain whose activity governs behaviour, language and consciousness. 131 00:17:33,320 --> 00:17:57,100 These prints were produced in sequence were colour and composition acts as signifiers of the active brain tissue generating electric fields. 132 00:17:57,100 --> 00:18:02,800 So the next thing. So there are a number of process images that might be of interest to you. 133 00:18:02,800 --> 00:18:24,550 Here's one. I think that Sarah's idea leads quite nicely to repetition and what happens if you repeat something. 134 00:18:24,550 --> 00:18:34,430 Can Campbell's quote was nice? Because it talks about how you might find a solidity to the thing that you're working with. 135 00:18:34,430 --> 00:18:40,200 But I also quite like John Cage's quote that I'm paraphrasing him, perhaps mangling a little bit. 136 00:18:40,200 --> 00:18:46,450 But where he says that if something is boring for a minute, try it for five minutes. 137 00:18:46,450 --> 00:18:51,430 And et cetera, et cetera. I'm paraphrasing. Somebody will know the correct quote. 138 00:18:51,430 --> 00:19:01,830 But you get the idea. What happens if you keep doing something? 139 00:19:01,830 --> 00:19:06,990 So this is actually the piece that I've laid out here at the front. You're welcome to take a look. 140 00:19:06,990 --> 00:19:17,910 Hans, you admire, is a analysis to grow up in West Germany, as it was then his grandfather and father ran a printing plant. 141 00:19:17,910 --> 00:19:22,410 And his earliest work, which you can see in his book Typo, 142 00:19:22,410 --> 00:19:28,080 is literally the clean up sheets collected from around the printing works when he was a small child. 143 00:19:28,080 --> 00:19:34,380 He was fascinated by these sheets that had chaotic colour combinations on them and white spirit, 144 00:19:34,380 --> 00:19:37,890 you know, come off the rollers and it spread itself across the sheets, 145 00:19:37,890 --> 00:19:47,340 and he collected them all up from the bins and he stashed them all away in a drawer and a desk, I think was in his father's office. 146 00:19:47,340 --> 00:19:49,080 And when his family found these prints, 147 00:19:49,080 --> 00:19:54,010 they were disgusted and threw them all away because they weren't what people were meant to see of the printing process. 148 00:19:54,010 --> 00:20:05,570 Of course, people were meant to see the beautifully printed books that the company made, and Meyer was interested in the throwaway. 149 00:20:05,570 --> 00:20:14,120 But this is a work of his, I think, leads quite nicely on from the idea of repetition on from series three into repetition. 150 00:20:14,120 --> 00:20:19,020 Typekit action. And. 151 00:20:19,020 --> 00:20:29,380 It comes from a series that he made several years before with the first alphabet, where he created from A to Z, an alphabet of single letters. 152 00:20:29,380 --> 00:20:36,220 Arranged in multiples over printed one single letter, repeated several times in a pattern. 153 00:20:36,220 --> 00:20:42,070 Larger prints and he took those prints and turned them into this piece of work. 154 00:20:42,070 --> 00:20:47,440 And it's not immediately obvious how it was done, or at least it isn't to me. 155 00:20:47,440 --> 00:20:52,540 And insightful, he he describes the book Typekit, he describes how he did this. 156 00:20:52,540 --> 00:20:59,230 So from the first Alphabet series, the twenty six figures of the alphabet were transferred to a photo typesetting plate, 157 00:20:59,230 --> 00:21:06,410 a much smaller size with the help of a machine called the Star Setter Graph, which is the first photo of typesetter. 158 00:21:06,410 --> 00:21:17,380 This side note here is that there's a bit of a concern that this technology is not being kept because it's more recent. 159 00:21:17,380 --> 00:21:24,610 And I know that there's certain people here, the body and who would like to make sure that lots of that machinery is kept because it comes from a very 160 00:21:24,610 --> 00:21:30,700 particular point in history that was then very quickly superseded in the latter part of last century. 161 00:21:30,700 --> 00:21:39,010 But the star set a graph that Maya used was the first time photo type setser and each configuration of letters was exposed time and again, 162 00:21:39,010 --> 00:21:43,210 all by chance, as fast as possible on a designated surface, 163 00:21:43,210 --> 00:21:48,190 measuring 25 pikers by 34 pikers with the possibility of shifting horizontally and 164 00:21:48,190 --> 00:21:54,370 vertically during an action and each exposure time was limited to 13 minutes. 165 00:21:54,370 --> 00:21:59,950 In the firm spirit of chance, you decided on that figure. That's how they were all exposed. 166 00:21:59,950 --> 00:22:06,040 And he says, I only saw the final result when it was developed, but there was no instance in which I wasn't pleased. 167 00:22:06,040 --> 00:22:25,680 Nothing can go wrong. Well, one must simply leave it up to chance. And you can see here, if you take a closer look, the letters are scattered. 168 00:22:25,680 --> 00:22:31,050 Singly at the beginning and as they go round and as they come inside, 169 00:22:31,050 --> 00:22:37,770 they gradually build up to not a completely solid black surface, but fairly solid. 170 00:22:37,770 --> 00:22:43,860 And that was done by Miss Repetition process following a sequence, so there's a rule, 171 00:22:43,860 --> 00:22:49,440 which is no the thing I'm interested in, and the sequence was simply the first print was A-plus B. 172 00:22:49,440 --> 00:22:59,000 The second was A-plus B plus C, then eight plus B to C, plus the considerably over printing each of those letters. 173 00:22:59,000 --> 00:23:04,280 Again and again and again, until this is the result and looking at it closely, you can't really see those letters. 174 00:23:04,280 --> 00:23:08,680 It's been reduced to an extremely small size. 175 00:23:08,680 --> 00:23:25,780 And mayor calls this, and in fact, a lot of his work, a process of setting up sorry setting and then winding up. 176 00:23:25,780 --> 00:23:29,570 Something I think that's really interesting there is visually. 177 00:23:29,570 --> 00:23:36,920 What that kind of repetition does to your eyes, to the way that you see something and then therefore the way that you interpret it and read it. 178 00:23:36,920 --> 00:23:40,760 This is a piece of mine I made last year called nylon. 179 00:23:40,760 --> 00:23:44,700 Nylon is like a bastardised version of new land. 180 00:23:44,700 --> 00:23:57,500 So as best, I understand it. There was a period in history where new land became a common name of people and also places. 181 00:23:57,500 --> 00:24:02,240 So anything that's called newlin of any kind that sounds at all similar to this. 182 00:24:02,240 --> 00:24:08,630 And I suppose it comes from a time when people first started marking out land as their own finding territory, if you like. 183 00:24:08,630 --> 00:24:18,780 There are lots of Nuland's, I think, in Cornwall. And my idea with this was I wanted to make the type move. 184 00:24:18,780 --> 00:24:26,750 OK. It's continuous repetitions on a sheet quite large. 185 00:24:26,750 --> 00:24:32,240 And I want to continue over and over and over print and see if colour can be generated. 186 00:24:32,240 --> 00:24:38,600 There's a phenomenon that others will know much more about than I do where you use black and white. 187 00:24:38,600 --> 00:24:46,110 And because of the vibration between them, the way that they move together and move on the page, you can see colour. 188 00:24:46,110 --> 00:24:54,890 And people have said they can see colour in this, this is illusory here because of the projects that we have on the colour spectrum, 189 00:24:54,890 --> 00:25:04,110 but if it's if you see it in real life, people have said they can see colours moving in and it's just black and opaque white over nothing else. 190 00:25:04,110 --> 00:25:16,140 OK. But it was thinking of these ideas of new language and new relating them to new land. 191 00:25:16,140 --> 00:25:24,510 Staying with repetition, this is an artist who's currently based in Detroit, Wood, Amos Kennedy. 192 00:25:24,510 --> 00:25:41,010 And he makes prints that look like this. The I think they're all on 18 by 12 inch paper stock, which is a common US size. 193 00:25:41,010 --> 00:25:47,280 Mrs. Rosa Parks series. So much of his work follows this former. 194 00:25:47,280 --> 00:25:52,900 Portrait. It's on this brown craft paper. 195 00:25:52,900 --> 00:26:03,370 Big, bold type. Over background, so I. And also a show of his in Brooklyn Library in 2017. 196 00:26:03,370 --> 00:26:09,680 And he had a whole wall like this, this is actually from a different show in Richmond, Virginia, last year. 197 00:26:09,680 --> 00:26:16,160 But what's interesting to me about it is what scale and repetition does to his work and what it does to the way that you can, 198 00:26:16,160 --> 00:26:24,030 you know, the way that you view it and what you can then see in it as well, how that then starts to generate pattern. 199 00:26:24,030 --> 00:26:42,020 Purely through repetition of this format. On a much smaller scale is the work of the Scottish artist in Hamilton, Finley. 200 00:26:42,020 --> 00:26:54,040 What I like about his work is it's it's small in scale and in idea, but it's very strong in how it transmits that idea. 201 00:26:54,040 --> 00:26:58,870 Very simple repetition through this poem, through this book. 202 00:26:58,870 --> 00:27:13,810 About turning over the Earth. He's talking about seasons changing. 203 00:27:13,810 --> 00:27:20,150 And how? I go back through it. 204 00:27:20,150 --> 00:27:27,360 There's the physical obviously turning over the page. To reveal what's underneath. 205 00:27:27,360 --> 00:27:45,090 It's a really simple act. And it's a I think it's a useful act to think about when we're looking at books. 206 00:27:45,090 --> 00:27:58,290 A little more from Ken Campbell. This is a vehicle fire dogs that you might in 91. 207 00:27:58,290 --> 00:28:04,900 And it was made at the start of the first Gulf War was when he started making the book each book. 208 00:28:04,900 --> 00:28:11,630 So, Campbell, somewhere between a year and a year and a half to make. 209 00:28:11,630 --> 00:28:18,370 This is an edition of 33, so you get an idea about the labour involved in this kind of book. 210 00:28:18,370 --> 00:28:25,390 And there are 86 pages. If we're thinking about repetition. 211 00:28:25,390 --> 00:28:34,190 Work in this kind of way. There's crossovers with other themes here in terms of the materials that he's using. 212 00:28:34,190 --> 00:28:42,370 I'll come back to that later. But I'm interested here in the repetition, both of the The Shape. 213 00:28:42,370 --> 00:28:49,620 It's moving through the book. But also of these poems. 214 00:28:49,620 --> 00:28:56,290 And I'll just read you a short piece that he says and the way he describes. 215 00:28:56,290 --> 00:29:04,350 What he was doing here. So this is his own poetry that he's written that's included in this book. 216 00:29:04,350 --> 00:29:09,720 I took short phrases from each of the six poems. 217 00:29:09,720 --> 00:29:19,000 And reverse the order in relation to the problems. And then place the freezes in the dark margins of chosen pages. 218 00:29:19,000 --> 00:29:28,680 So if poem one phrase from poem six. Poem to a phrase from five and so on until poem six and a phrase from poem one, 219 00:29:28,680 --> 00:29:34,850 the idea was that from the beginning, the hidden phrases would be predictive of poetics to come. 220 00:29:34,850 --> 00:29:43,480 And increasingly, towards the end, the phrases would echo what had been read during the journey through the book. 221 00:29:43,480 --> 00:30:04,350 And he finishes by saying, I do not know if this device works. So you can see up at the top there through the margins and hidden away often. 222 00:30:04,350 --> 00:30:10,820 Elements of some of the other poems. So the whole book interacts with itself. 223 00:30:10,820 --> 00:30:19,240 If you choose to read it in that way. And there's plenty of writers who you can read about, artist books say. 224 00:30:19,240 --> 00:30:24,460 And Ken Campbell doesn't particularly associate himself with artist books. 225 00:30:24,460 --> 00:30:28,870 He is an artist who makes books. Is there a differentiation? 226 00:30:28,870 --> 00:30:43,140 It's an interesting conversation. But this interesting conversation about artists books about how they read okay and how you navigate through them. 227 00:30:43,140 --> 00:30:49,460 You don't necessarily start at the very beginning and go through to the end and then put it down. 228 00:30:49,460 --> 00:30:58,240 There are many different ways of navigating. OK. 229 00:30:58,240 --> 00:31:04,090 That leads onto nicely to the next theme, which is around improvisation. 230 00:31:04,090 --> 00:31:25,070 Something that Ken Campbell has used a lot through the years. 231 00:31:25,070 --> 00:31:34,130 So interestingly, both Ken Campbell and Wolfgang van Gogh were worked in the trade, in the print trade. 232 00:31:34,130 --> 00:31:42,610 From a young age as apprentices. As compulsive as. 233 00:31:42,610 --> 00:31:49,880 And. But let's just read you a little bit from Wolfgang van Gaal's book. 234 00:31:49,880 --> 00:31:57,160 My Way to Typography. Which is a very interestingly arranged book. 235 00:31:57,160 --> 00:32:03,110 It doesn't necessarily sit in a sequence that you would assume. 236 00:32:03,110 --> 00:32:08,960 It's just been republished as well by the publishers, in fact, after being out of print. 237 00:32:08,960 --> 00:32:11,990 So I'm just going to give you a little bit because I think it's really nice the way he talks 238 00:32:11,990 --> 00:32:20,700 about what what his work was like before I go on to talk about this work a little more. 239 00:32:20,700 --> 00:32:26,190 My workday began at seven o'clock in the morning and ended after five o'clock in the evening in the first year. 240 00:32:26,190 --> 00:32:31,920 It was the duty of the Apprentice to attend to everyone's general needs during the cold months. 241 00:32:31,920 --> 00:32:40,710 I started before dawn, responsible for kindling, the fire with wood and coal to heat our section of the building before the employees arrived. 242 00:32:40,710 --> 00:32:47,250 The company was called Ru Ru a Approuvé. I'm not sure I pronounce it pronouncing located in a small coach house on 243 00:32:47,250 --> 00:32:54,670 middle strata close to the outskirts of the old mediaeval section of Stuttgart. 244 00:32:54,670 --> 00:33:01,690 Miraculously, industrial buildings in our area were unscathed by the allied bombardment during the Second World War. 245 00:33:01,690 --> 00:33:07,060 It goes on for half an hour around morning break time. I also had the task of shopping for the employees. 246 00:33:07,060 --> 00:33:15,580 The lists of request was always the same. And several others wanted the popular tabloids with large, bold headlines and coloured pictures. 247 00:33:15,580 --> 00:33:23,380 The printers Typekit this room, bookbinder ordered bread, cheese, ham, sausages and beer princes like beer. 248 00:33:23,380 --> 00:33:30,170 You hear this a lot. The first time I went on my round of errands, I brought back the wrong beer. 249 00:33:30,170 --> 00:33:38,480 The bottle was green instead of brown, apparently beer from a brown bottle tastes better, so it was sent back to the store to make the exchange. 250 00:33:38,480 --> 00:33:49,090 And to this day, I only drink brown bottled beer. So. 251 00:33:49,090 --> 00:34:03,270 Where does this piece of work come from? 252 00:34:03,270 --> 00:34:08,970 As I learnt to master the techniques of letterpress prints in my work with typography became more experimental. 253 00:34:08,970 --> 00:34:12,660 It started with letters and type elements composed in a circular ring. 254 00:34:12,660 --> 00:34:19,270 The round compositions, that's this work. This theme is about improvisation. 255 00:34:19,270 --> 00:34:25,420 So this is how Vanguard got there. Actually, the compositions came about as the result of a mishap. 256 00:34:25,420 --> 00:34:32,410 Well, morning I lost my grip on a heavy type draw and it fell to the floor. It was filled with the smallest type we had in the shop. 257 00:34:32,410 --> 00:34:37,180 A six point semi bowled. Berthold accident's grotesque. 258 00:34:37,180 --> 00:34:44,350 I'm making a presumption that most people know something about letterpress printing. If you don't, six-point is tiny. 259 00:34:44,350 --> 00:34:50,390 You can't read it when it's on the end of a piece of metal. 260 00:34:50,390 --> 00:35:00,260 The whole case, unforeseen and unpaid work for the weekend was assured to distribute and replace every character back into the tight case, 261 00:35:00,260 --> 00:35:05,870 including punctuation and numbers, would take the full two days while gathering up the letters, 262 00:35:05,870 --> 00:35:18,360 I had a strange idea to fill a cardboard ring with the title standing on end letter service positioned upwards until it was packed solid in a ring. 263 00:35:18,360 --> 00:35:23,640 One such round competition yielded two principle surfaces the customary face of the letters, 264 00:35:23,640 --> 00:35:28,530 and by carefully turning the compose ring upside down the underside of the type. 265 00:35:28,530 --> 00:35:36,640 Most foundry letters and word spaces have a characteristic groove and feet on the bottom of the metal body looking like an equal sign. 266 00:35:36,640 --> 00:35:45,450 It was a revelation that this structure repeatedly left its unmistakeable tracks in every printing trial. 267 00:35:45,450 --> 00:35:53,570 And he made an entire series from this work. And in the book My Way to Typography. 268 00:35:53,570 --> 00:35:58,600 I think this is quite an interesting way round, it's like a strategy or a device, if you like. 269 00:35:58,600 --> 00:36:08,530 At a similar time, he was also travelling to the Middle East quite a lot, and he took lots of photographs out of the aeroplane windows. 270 00:36:08,530 --> 00:36:15,330 Some of them have cities as they came into land. I think particularly in Jordan and Syria. 271 00:36:15,330 --> 00:36:26,560 And in the book. He juxtaposes this work with his photographs arranged in a similar ring of. 272 00:36:26,560 --> 00:36:31,750 These cities from above. And they look incredibly similar. 273 00:36:31,750 --> 00:36:36,700 And the thing is interesting argument there about the way round you go about creating work, 274 00:36:36,700 --> 00:36:40,480 whereas I was describing before my work with the tax landscape series is going out in a 275 00:36:40,480 --> 00:36:45,520 city and taking photographs of that city in that landscape and over a period of time, 276 00:36:45,520 --> 00:36:50,170 they come together in a form. This is almost like the exact opposite. 277 00:36:50,170 --> 00:36:57,950 He's found the form, the typography is taken or the anti typography, if you like. 278 00:36:57,950 --> 00:37:12,110 In another situation, these cities seen from above. I said in my introduction that. 279 00:37:12,110 --> 00:37:17,600 It's interesting to think of these strategies in these different devices as starting points, not end points. 280 00:37:17,600 --> 00:37:23,540 So if this theme is about improvisation to me, it's about improvisation. 281 00:37:23,540 --> 00:37:28,760 And then where there was chance encounters lead you, what you then make from that? 282 00:37:28,760 --> 00:37:33,560 It's not an end in itself for me. And I think for others as well, it's not. 283 00:37:33,560 --> 00:37:40,140 So Ken Campbell talks about if you have the skills chance being, you know, a valid avenue. 284 00:37:40,140 --> 00:37:48,450 Surprise if you like. So this is from a series that I started this year. 285 00:37:48,450 --> 00:37:54,020 Of overpromising and repetition again comes back in here, that theme. 286 00:37:54,020 --> 00:38:00,780 Where? I'll show you. This is on the on the bed of the press. 287 00:38:00,780 --> 00:38:06,240 This is what we call the form set up. And it's one single column of text. 288 00:38:06,240 --> 00:38:12,800 The moves on a diagonal by an end space in each row. 289 00:38:12,800 --> 00:38:18,520 So I wondered what happened. If you keep printing that. 290 00:38:18,520 --> 00:38:22,660 Over and over. Moving the sheep very slightly each time. 291 00:38:22,660 --> 00:38:27,980 So it went through multiple variations that were then thrown away. 292 00:38:27,980 --> 00:38:36,500 Before it got to this, where I then worked out carefully to get that pattern, to get the movement in there, where there's gaps. 293 00:38:36,500 --> 00:38:43,570 It's not entirely regular. How I'd have to move the sheet and the piece of paper you can see over there on the left 294 00:38:43,570 --> 00:38:50,290 hand side is a reminder for me as I'm princeling about where each number should come, 295 00:38:50,290 --> 00:38:57,640 where each party should come, and it's just a measurement guide. As to which numbers I should skip out in half centimetre increments. 296 00:38:57,640 --> 00:39:03,880 So it came purely from imprecise improvisation and wondering what that might look like. 297 00:39:03,880 --> 00:39:15,120 And then working backwards to create a composition from that. 298 00:39:15,120 --> 00:39:20,720 And I also just want to mention here again, draw another artist through into this section. 299 00:39:20,720 --> 00:39:33,590 Marianne Dages again. This is the Ultra his book generated through character recognition. 300 00:39:33,590 --> 00:39:40,230 Google Translate software. And what she says about improvisation, I think, is really interesting. 301 00:39:40,230 --> 00:39:44,920 Intuition, intuition. Experimentation and chance. 302 00:39:44,920 --> 00:39:49,780 I can't help myself when it comes to used books and a lot of the time an artist's book begins to 303 00:39:49,780 --> 00:39:55,000 form because I've been reading one thing and found a book with interesting images in another. 304 00:39:55,000 --> 00:40:09,570 And the two seemingly unrelated sources combine in my head. I think that happens throughout this book. 305 00:40:09,570 --> 00:40:22,530 Similarly, with Ken Campbell's work. You can see here there's a density of a that's built up and reading about his attitude to the work. 306 00:40:22,530 --> 00:40:27,560 A lot of that comes about through for him. That's not. 307 00:40:27,560 --> 00:40:34,060 And in fact, fighting with the process and fighting with the press. And the way it's handling. 308 00:40:34,060 --> 00:40:38,200 And he's improvising ideas all the time on the bed of the press that in some ways 309 00:40:38,200 --> 00:40:44,760 is the source for his work and for his ideas what the physical material does. 310 00:40:44,760 --> 00:40:54,210 How it handles, how you can mutate it. And how sometimes you can make it do what it's not meant to do. 311 00:40:54,210 --> 00:41:04,060 But it comes through in this work of enormous power, I think, in the end. That speaks to that process. 312 00:41:04,060 --> 00:41:09,330 OK. This is something that's interesting to think. 313 00:41:09,330 --> 00:41:31,100 What happens if you don't work with words, with texts? David Morrison is a contemporary artist working in Brussels, Belgium. 314 00:41:31,100 --> 00:41:36,980 And his work with lots of press printing is like the press printing. 315 00:41:36,980 --> 00:41:54,380 Usually almost no text. This is a piece made from Rule, so rule type II elements, same height as the type that will print. 316 00:41:54,380 --> 00:42:09,870 Normally used for separating out sections of a page may be conventionally. But this is what David Morrison does with it. 317 00:42:09,870 --> 00:42:14,790 There's a video of this, I don't know if it's going to work, but we'll find out. 318 00:42:14,790 --> 00:42:23,340 But this shows is going to show his process as it moves around the bed and in contrast to the less the last section thinking about improvisation. 319 00:42:23,340 --> 00:42:34,890 This is not improvised. I might need to hit another button. 320 00:42:34,890 --> 00:42:39,990 Let's try it. Yeah. 321 00:42:39,990 --> 00:42:59,620 So he has a plan on the bed to the press. And then follows that plan around with the printings. 322 00:42:59,620 --> 00:43:12,730 I was going to keep going on loop. And when he describing this work, he says one of his main challenges was keeping it from moving because, 323 00:43:12,730 --> 00:43:16,330 as I'm sure you can see, there's not really anything that's on a right angle very much. 324 00:43:16,330 --> 00:43:31,540 There's a lot of diagonals and you have to keep it from moving through the room through the addition. 325 00:43:31,540 --> 00:43:44,200 The same artist. This work was made for an exhibition on the art of Yukio. 326 00:43:44,200 --> 00:43:52,620 Each invited artist chose one for one work from a list, and he, David Morrison, interpreted. 327 00:43:52,620 --> 00:44:02,060 That with the technique that he uses using his bathroom, we've just seen in the previous images. 328 00:44:02,060 --> 00:44:30,970 On this one, he drew in the computer first and illustrator. And he says that you started with around 15 sheets. 329 00:44:30,970 --> 00:44:39,720 And with those repeated printings. He finished with one copy that was happy with. 330 00:44:39,720 --> 00:44:49,400 So it gives you an idea about how things move through the process. Especially when you're working with if you like non-standard material. 331 00:44:49,400 --> 00:45:08,240 In different formats and orientations. This is where you have the question about what's left of us and what's not left Cyprus. 332 00:45:08,240 --> 00:45:15,230 Whereas the previous work is definitely lots of press uses brush roll that's found in every laser brush print shop. 333 00:45:15,230 --> 00:45:23,610 This is printed on a regular press that is used for lots of rest printing announced, but then in fact. 334 00:45:23,610 --> 00:45:29,400 But it's printed from ball bearings. OK. 335 00:45:29,400 --> 00:45:36,350 Stock down. On a mounted piece of a board on the press, so mounted type II. 336 00:45:36,350 --> 00:45:42,910 So that the press can print it so. Is it lots of press or not? 337 00:45:42,910 --> 00:45:47,680 And I know there's lots of arguments about photo polymer. People have divergent views on it. 338 00:45:47,680 --> 00:45:58,950 But this is using an actual material, individual pieces. So like we think of movable type, these are movable ball bearings. 339 00:45:58,950 --> 00:46:07,220 OK. Very briefly, another piece of Ken Campbell's work. 340 00:46:07,220 --> 00:46:14,380 Broken rules, broken rules and double crosses. These are this is furniture. 341 00:46:14,380 --> 00:46:19,190 So if we're thinking about non-standard material that's still less of. 342 00:46:19,190 --> 00:46:22,400 This is furniture usually used to create space. 343 00:46:22,400 --> 00:46:29,570 It's white space, negative space in printing over printed onto each other, so bumped up to type height. 344 00:46:29,570 --> 00:46:41,870 And then printed as solids over the top of each other. That's just the process image showing you how that's done. 345 00:46:41,870 --> 00:46:54,280 It's a wood frame that the. He's cut out to begin with to fit together the shapes he wants. 346 00:46:54,280 --> 00:47:03,000 A an Italian artist working at the moment based in Milan, Luciano Pasolini. 347 00:47:03,000 --> 00:47:10,550 He's interesting because he works both with less press printing. Small edition books and wood sculpture. 348 00:47:10,550 --> 00:47:15,150 And the two are one of them the same for him, sculptural printing. 349 00:47:15,150 --> 00:47:20,760 And in his studio, he has examples of each with repeating shapes all the way through. 350 00:47:20,760 --> 00:47:28,910 He's working with very distinct shapes. Again and again, whether it's printing, whether it's sculpture. 351 00:47:28,910 --> 00:47:33,290 Elbow and tempo for people who speak Italian will know. 352 00:47:33,290 --> 00:47:39,290 It just means the good time or a good time. You just described it as everyone needs a good time. 353 00:47:39,290 --> 00:47:48,590 This is the place he goes to for a good song. Prince. So again, this is less of press material. 354 00:47:48,590 --> 00:47:55,060 But used without words. And the sculptures that he creates as well. 355 00:47:55,060 --> 00:48:05,920 All have the same format. And he describes it as a basic human form, if you like the figure standing figure with a with the torso. 356 00:48:05,920 --> 00:48:26,290 And is considering working with that element through his books and through sculpture. 357 00:48:26,290 --> 00:48:36,890 He says I make no difference between text and images. A printed text is an image, although the country is not true. 358 00:48:36,890 --> 00:48:48,650 And everything is in the service of the overall composition. That's my basic concern. 359 00:48:48,650 --> 00:48:56,010 So. There's a Rogue One. 360 00:48:56,010 --> 00:49:07,380 Let's go in the. So the next section is about non-lethal press materials. 361 00:49:07,380 --> 00:49:14,510 You can make an argument, the ball bearings and non-expert materials, if you like. This is going back to Wolfgang Vinagre. 362 00:49:14,510 --> 00:49:26,370 And he describes in his book Wanting to make his first book, this is still at the same time that he's an apprentice compositor. 363 00:49:26,370 --> 00:49:36,450 But all of this work is made through woodcuts. But it's clearly informed by his apprenticeship. 364 00:49:36,450 --> 00:49:42,490 And he made contact with the wood artist Grijalva. Which I may not pronounce right. 365 00:49:42,490 --> 00:49:49,290 Somebody, please correct me if I. Who he as a young student in Vanguard, 366 00:49:49,290 --> 00:49:59,130 invited him to give a lecture at his institute because he thought appreciably would shake things up in what he perceived to be the stuffy, 367 00:49:59,130 --> 00:50:05,010 typographic world of that time in the early 60s. Particularly coming from Swiss typography. 368 00:50:05,010 --> 00:50:28,090 He thought it needed shaking in some ways. So these are elements from that first book that he produced. 369 00:50:28,090 --> 00:50:33,550 I showed a couple of images earlier of this space work in progress. 370 00:50:33,550 --> 00:50:39,320 This is just very simply showing you using non-lethal materials. 371 00:50:39,320 --> 00:50:45,280 This imagery that's in here. This is thinking about water and flooding. 372 00:50:45,280 --> 00:50:51,650 It's a series that responds to the area where, where I live and work. 373 00:50:51,650 --> 00:50:58,250 And our river, we have a river that literally runs underneath the front of our house in a culvert. 374 00:50:58,250 --> 00:51:09,220 Sometimes it doesn't run underneath the house. If you if anybody, you know, told the dial told it, I was where, where I live. 375 00:51:09,220 --> 00:51:14,570 And the waters come straight off the moors and have a lot of peat in them, so that orange. 376 00:51:14,570 --> 00:51:22,940 So I'm thinking about how to get that across. This is just very simple. 377 00:51:22,940 --> 00:51:27,030 String laid down on the board, on the bed of the press. 378 00:51:27,030 --> 00:51:34,950 Type II and then things printed from an over printed again and again and often without rethinking so that you get these different layering, 379 00:51:34,950 --> 00:51:47,620 the layering happening. So thinking about what material you can put through the same press without damaging anything, but what can you put through it? 380 00:51:47,620 --> 00:51:55,080 Aaron Coke is a really interesting artist, working currently in Colorado, he's based in the States. 381 00:51:55,080 --> 00:52:02,080 Um, he works at Colorado College, but also runs a press from there as well, called the new lights press. 382 00:52:02,080 --> 00:52:10,730 Which publishes books and broadsides. So in some ways, it's quite a traditional press, private press, if you like. 383 00:52:10,730 --> 00:52:18,810 But the work that he produces is anything but traditional. Working with non-standard materials. 384 00:52:18,810 --> 00:52:25,670 But still using the techniques and processes and equipment machines of less press printing. 385 00:52:25,670 --> 00:52:34,890 And he has a really interesting approach to language and how it's created and how it's read. 386 00:52:34,890 --> 00:52:42,210 I'm just going to cycle through some images so you can see how this work is done and then say a little bit in his words. 387 00:52:42,210 --> 00:53:04,130 How he describes his work. So this is a regular flatbed proof press that lots of you will be familiar with. 388 00:53:04,130 --> 00:53:09,480 And this is a real mix of polygraph. I suppose you could call it that. 389 00:53:09,480 --> 00:53:31,390 And laser cook. So Coke says I think the act of reading is an everyday miracle. 390 00:53:31,390 --> 00:53:36,610 My work is often about slowing down reading by adding layers of noise. 391 00:53:36,610 --> 00:53:44,470 The general idea is to force the reader. To see their reading and in that seeing to start to build. 392 00:53:44,470 --> 00:53:50,860 Sorry, I've missed about my work is about slowing down reading by adding layers of noise. 393 00:53:50,860 --> 00:54:00,470 The idea is to force the reader to see their reading and in that scene to start to build compounding layers onto or off the reading experience. 394 00:54:00,470 --> 00:54:10,880 Some of my work is difficult to read in a traditional sense. But I don't think the reading is about successfully decoding or solving the text. 395 00:54:10,880 --> 00:54:25,330 The reading is the process of decoding. The oscillation between the layers of seeing and reading. 396 00:54:25,330 --> 00:54:42,800 It's a couple more pieces of his work here. So it can be read in a conventional way, but it can be read in other ways. 397 00:54:42,800 --> 00:54:49,920 And he says he goes on to say something very interesting about how he how he thinks of books and book production. 398 00:54:49,920 --> 00:54:57,180 And his work, I used to plan everything out, but now I'm working towards more and more improvisation with the goal of books being 399 00:54:57,180 --> 00:55:03,150 written and printed simultaneously signature by signature in a kind of feedback loop. 400 00:55:03,150 --> 00:55:11,900 I want the books to be more like writing or drawing or making a film where the actual thing emerges from the process. 401 00:55:11,900 --> 00:55:19,190 I'm obsessed with the idea of an emergent text or an emergent book. 402 00:55:19,190 --> 00:55:27,640 I've talked a lot here and heard a lot said here. About book production. 403 00:55:27,640 --> 00:55:37,460 And about how authors write texts and then the intervention and the process that happens beyond that point. 404 00:55:37,460 --> 00:55:45,050 That involves Prince's Composites is being asked to interpret these texts rather than see them as completely finished. 405 00:55:45,050 --> 00:55:49,090 They have to do interpretation. Throughout history. 406 00:55:49,090 --> 00:56:03,710 And so I think that's a really interesting idea about the process of making a book and the meaning that's involved in that. 407 00:56:03,710 --> 00:56:21,070 Last thing. Again, following on from meaning and how we read things. 408 00:56:21,070 --> 00:56:29,130 I've included. Edward, you Johansson's. Quote there, because. 409 00:56:29,130 --> 00:56:36,130 Is the installation that he's created? I think is really interesting. 410 00:56:36,130 --> 00:56:47,780 Again, this links back with thinking about non-standard materials. Piece called If I pronounce it right, the way that a is a long, long and so vulgar, 411 00:56:47,780 --> 00:56:57,040 I think like the city of or house in Denmark, so I think it's vulgar. Please correct me if I'm wrong. 412 00:56:57,040 --> 00:57:06,970 But this is now playing with the idea of scale. So less lessons, a laser cut and then put through an etching process. 413 00:57:06,970 --> 00:57:15,580 So this is. Most of Johansson's work is with lots of press, but he's not beholden to that if the scale. 414 00:57:15,580 --> 00:57:29,210 And the words. Demands a different process. And he says very simply about this work. 415 00:57:29,210 --> 00:57:33,020 A lot of the time, there's a curiosity that needs to be quenched and vulgar. 416 00:57:33,020 --> 00:57:43,150 I was wondering how big would I managed to print? And then the rest of the project stems from that curiosity. 417 00:57:43,150 --> 00:57:50,500 I found the paper settled on the idea of banners and then found a concepts of like the fits, the theme Volga means death. 418 00:57:50,500 --> 00:57:57,480 So for him. The way I interpret this, it's a dare or a challenge to himself. 419 00:57:57,480 --> 00:58:09,580 And how big he can work. And what that scale does to the work and what it says. 420 00:58:09,580 --> 00:58:11,650 Going back to some of the work of your e-mail, 421 00:58:11,650 --> 00:58:21,200 this is a piece called Typekit Solon that was made for a concrete poetry exhibition in Brighton in nineteen sixty seven nineteen sixty eight, 422 00:58:21,200 --> 00:58:28,490 I think it was made sixty seven. The exhibition was sixty eight. 423 00:58:28,490 --> 00:58:33,530 Typekit columns. These were printed letterpress. 424 00:58:33,530 --> 00:58:47,230 OK, so they fit are of the process, and there's an outside of a pillar that's made of perspex printed with special links unless a press on foil. 425 00:58:47,230 --> 00:58:55,790 Which Meyer says wasn't at all easy. Foy was then wrapped around the inside, which resulted in a wall effect, 426 00:58:55,790 --> 00:59:03,630 and there was also a pillar with another one inside, which produced correspondingly more complicated patterns. 427 00:59:03,630 --> 00:59:15,430 That's how he describes it in his book, Typo. And these were on public like a public space intervention, if you like. 428 00:59:15,430 --> 00:59:19,880 And they have a kind of almost human scale to me. 429 00:59:19,880 --> 00:59:30,090 Very slightly over human size. And again, like some of the other work we've seen, I've shown you as a sculptural quality to it as well. 430 00:59:30,090 --> 00:59:43,840 3-D quality, which is something that installation work. How's as a possibility? 431 00:59:43,840 --> 00:59:55,870 And this is something I thought about a lot. A couple of years ago, I had a commission to read from E Street Arts and Leeds to work with. 432 00:59:55,870 --> 00:59:59,410 An archaeological collection of a site in the city centre, Leeds, 433 00:59:59,410 --> 01:00:10,120 that was cleared to make way for a new shopping centre in the Victoria Gate Shopping Centre, which is very fancy if anyone's been there. 434 01:00:10,120 --> 01:00:15,250 But they have to do a full archaeological survey on the site as I understand it, 435 01:00:15,250 --> 01:00:24,020 because when they first did a cursory study and an initial study, they found human remains on the site. 436 01:00:24,020 --> 01:00:29,960 From a long time ago, but still human remains, and then I think that triggers a deeper survey. 437 01:00:29,960 --> 01:00:38,510 So this piece of work was a response to that survey. So using objects found in that survey. 438 01:00:38,510 --> 01:00:49,490 Find like all the objects. And each of these is it opening on tracing paper about metre wide, about five or six metres tall? 439 01:00:49,490 --> 01:00:56,240 And each of these represents a trench that was dug like a simple trench that would have been dug. 440 01:00:56,240 --> 01:01:06,800 The archaeologists then mapped the finds from. With texts that were taken from the final survey report. 441 01:01:06,800 --> 01:01:14,120 And so it's playing with. Partly, at least, what can be done without a press because there was no press. 442 01:01:14,120 --> 01:01:21,140 In this space that I was using. So there's an improvised press, magnets holding letters in place. 443 01:01:21,140 --> 01:01:37,020 It works. It's very slow, but it works. And the idea was to move the finds these objects from the site away from their original function because they. 444 01:01:37,020 --> 01:01:42,730 No longer serve that original function. And create something new from give him the new life, if you like. 445 01:01:42,730 --> 01:01:50,530 So there are things like roof tiles and their spoons, coins, bone discs. 446 01:01:50,530 --> 01:01:57,910 People weren't sure what the bone discs were, but they you see them repeating the. 447 01:01:57,910 --> 01:02:06,250 And one thing I found really satisfying about this was a an archaeologist who came to visit it. 448 01:02:06,250 --> 01:02:11,680 Who appreciated it, because he said this is the archaeology of the working classes. 449 01:02:11,680 --> 01:02:17,750 Because all the objects, all the finds from the survey were what normally would just be thrown away. 450 01:02:17,750 --> 01:02:25,310 There'd be no interest in studying them at all, because it's not a Roman chariot that's been found in Yorkshire. 451 01:02:25,310 --> 01:02:33,500 It's not some kind of burial site. This specific interest that the all the objects, all the items come from people's day to day lives. 452 01:02:33,500 --> 01:02:40,310 So that's also part of the layering of what it represents. 453 01:02:40,310 --> 01:02:48,430 And the thing in this work, certainly in my thinking around it and my thinking around the other artist. 454 01:02:48,430 --> 01:02:53,870 Throughout this talk I've introduced to you or shown to you. 455 01:02:53,870 --> 01:02:58,850 There's this fundamental question of what if? Two very, very simple words, but what if you try this thing? 456 01:02:58,850 --> 01:03:09,120 What if you try something? What if you try using a different method for generating texts from what you would usually use? 457 01:03:09,120 --> 01:03:14,430 What if you try printing rules in a repeating pattern? 458 01:03:14,430 --> 01:03:26,430 What happens? What happens if you continue continually over print text, what does that give you? 459 01:03:26,430 --> 01:03:32,260 And then this work, some of those surfaces there are raised tight by gaffer tape. 460 01:03:32,260 --> 01:03:42,650 Stuck around a piece of card and then flattening. What if you do that a lot about the materials here that we work with and what can be done with them? 461 01:03:42,650 --> 01:03:55,330 What that then says and like I said several times, but improvisational attitude as a starting point, where does that then lead you? 462 01:03:55,330 --> 01:04:09,920 What if you made an enormous column of text and put it outside in a shopping centre for people to walk around, avoid bump into what happens? 463 01:04:09,920 --> 01:04:15,020 And that is my conclusion. If you like. What if you tried this thing? 464 01:04:15,020 --> 01:04:37,845 What can go wrong? Thank you very much for listening.