Chicago residency - October & November 2016
Artist-in-residence at Starshaped Press, Chicago 18th October to 14th November, 2016 Thanks to an Artists’ International Development Fund grant from Arts Council England and the British Council, I was able to travel to Chicago to spend some time at Jen Farrell’s Starshaped Press. During the month I also went to the Hamilton Wayzgoose in Wisconsin, worked alongside Tandem Felix Letterpress in Chicago and visited several other studios in the city. (Each of these has its own blog post.) However, Farrell was my host for the visit and I want to talk through some of the work I made at Starshaped.
For me, any residency has to engage with the place, the environment around and with the people you’re working alongside. I’d visited Starshaped on my 2015 cross-country US trip and, as soon as I arrived this time around, I was struck by a strange familiarity. The strongest memory by far was the elevated metro system - the ‘L’. Working in the Starshaped studio, the trains constantly rattle past behind the building. You hear them all day and night. (Unless of course we had those classic Wedding Present or New Order records cranked a little too loud.) So, in search of inspiration, I bought my Ventra card and jumped on the brown line to head downtown, into ‘The Loop’.
I’ve been doing a lot of automatic writing while travelling in the past few years. It started while getting early morning/late night coaches to/from my AA2A residency at UCLan in Preston (2014-15) and I’ve continued to use it as a way to generate ideas and unlock new directions. I was also on the look-out for repeat patterns - Starshaped has a reputation for innovative work using metal type and ornament and I wondered how this could affect my own practice.
Underneath the L:
Metal bridge near the Pilsen warehouse district:
Bridge across the North Branch Chicago River, crossed en route to the Starshaped studio each day:
With all these visual stimuli rattling round my head, I began figuring out a graphic representation. Starting with the idea of the L track supports seen from below and needing to get across the idea of repetition, I realised putting wood letters together created pattern from the negative space. The colour scheme looks to represent the degrading of the supports that hold the L - fading paint, rust and decades-old dirt.
I edited down the writing from the Loop travels into a series of memorable images; mishearings, repetitions and signs. The image above shows me figuring where the text elements should be placed. And below, imposing on-press (using the studio’s Vandercook SP15) and printing that text.
Here’s the final piece - ‘Chicago Loop language’. Hopefully it gets across that sense of movement and input to the senses that you get from exploring a new or less-familiar place. It’s an edition of 25. More shots and a link to buy it are on the Red Plate Press site here.
While I was at Starshaped I also missed my father’s birthday back home in England. I know; bad son. In recompense, I made a print for him based on a recent conversation. He’s been retired a long time now, but we were talking about his union membership. He joined the Draughtsmen and Allied Technicians’ Association (DATA) union early in his working life and never left. But, as a lot of unions did between the 1960s and 2000s, it kept amalgamating with other unions, so he was actually a member of five different unions in total.
I wanted to use the studio’s Alphablox to create a sense of the support and connections that unions offer. A hand seemed the obvious image.
The first colour of the Alphablox laid down:
And then the second. You can see the linear and reverse of the Alphablox that allow you to build up and emphasise imagery.
The finished print - ‘Five Decades’. More via the Red Plate Press site.
One last piece that I completed at Starshaped was a record of my 2015 US trip. I kept a record of sage advice, random outbursts and repeated phrases on that trip and turned it into a print made in three layers at the three studios I’ve worked in most over in 2015-16. London Centre for Book Arts (LCBA - kudos to Simon & Ira), Starshaped Press and my own studio. I brought the partially completed print with me to add the final layer: the places visited in 2015 in chronological order.
The title (‘Hot Mess of Letterpress’) - comes straight from Starshaped; it’s one of Farrell’s favourite sayings. A proper situation or a right to-do - that’ll be a hot mess. Is this a mid-West thing? I’m guessing it is.
Huge thanks to Jen Farrell and Josephine Gonda for hosting me and being such great company in Chicago. And thank you to the Arts Council and British Council for funding my trip.