#43

On wishes and epiphanies

As I dig that grave down-deeper, babe - mud beneath bare fingernails as sweat streams down mine brow - a pool of light beckons ahead. Rinsing mine skin in a golden glow, God calls forth.

Judy Garland as Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz (1939) dir. Victor Fleming.

In this-near-year, crawling from the mud, the brook, the Bully, mine life is anew. Waxing and waning poetic on all I’ve suffered, angel, I realise now that only good is coming to me. Severed, untethered, I’ve cultivated a space distinctly mine own, pure and just. A fluffy, stuffed animal sits in a lurid pink, happily-blank atop my desk. I squeeze its padded hand with my thumb and forefinger, and recall a bear my Father gifted my Mother during her pregnancy. ‘HUG ME’ it reads, across the chest as a firm instruction.

In the cold, September sun of the studio, lite seeping through the blinds, I look to the Valentines which line my walls. ‘I love you, Leah’ one reads, as a baby-faced Cupid curling at the edges. I debate whether to behead it.

Whilst I sit and consider this new work of mine - palm-sized Valentines, prayer books and tabloid rags - I reflect on the research I haven’t yet shared with you. Back in July, I found myself at Central Saint Martins, an arts University in London. There, for a week - heart-pounding, out of my depth - I studied, lovingly, Typography. In lauding over floral swashes and signatures, Humanist script and decorative type, I came to face a strange reality. Each and every illustrator, typesetter, designer and theorist referenced within that week was male. Sat solemn in darkness, pencil-in-hand I began to consider “What makes a typeface masculine? What does that look like? How does that feel or behave?”

By mine side as I write, dear reader, a text I’d purchased from a further trip, this time to London Centre for Book Arts (LCBA) in late August. Another week alone in a city unfamiliar, I attended ‘Making Books’, a short course exploring book and box making, hot foil pressing, and a host of binding techniques. Ambling around their bookshop one rain-sodden afternoon - a sleek and sophisticated affair, gold-embossed editions displayed with love and care - I encountered a book which has enlightened me, endlessly. A Messy History of Women in Printing and Typography, edited by Maryam Fanni, Matilda Flodmark and Sara Kaaman, explores just that.

I fixate, for a moment, on the word ‘messy’ for that is how I desperately wish to be. Unrestrained, antagonistic, angry and seen. I drum my fingers along its cover, tapping taut against a mock-woodblock of a drunken huddle of nuns amongst a flooded floor of open books, in what appears to be an ecclesiastical library. Wine glasses in hand, they dance together.

Lucille Ball in Ziegfeld Follies (1945) dir. Vincente Minnelli.

Illustrating the emergence of women type designers in early twentieth century Europe and the US, I found myself struck as a lightening strike, babe, upon combing its opening pages. The book speaks of a period pre-empting the ‘private press movement’ - a time in which bookmakers, printmakers and artisans alike sought to seize the means of print production, in direct response to the industrial revolution - in which women worked collaboratively to ‘gain control’ over their artistic practices in a once-was-and-still-is, it seems, male-dominated field.

I think, often, of the gift that this funding has given me. The ability to visit cities I’ve never been to, to get mine blood-soaked paws on techniques I’ve not once explored. Book-making and binding, embossing and printing. It feels for the first time, much like the women hidden within these pages, that I have regained total autonomy over my work, my time, my life. The will and vigour to work however I wish to, reader. An unfettered well of energy to pour into myself, and myself only. I wonder what position I would be in if I’d have done this a decade ago.

Alas I cannot grieve, only make.

Back at Central Saint Martins, a single day was spent within the University’s letterpress facility. A woman stands before me in an ink-smudged denim apron, firmly ribboned at the front, with eyes-slightly-narrowed and downturned. Looking to my sandals on that Summer’s day, she says, “I’m afraid you can’t wear those,” Embarrassed, of course, by my open-toed shoes in a room full of heavy-lead letters and printing presses, I apologise. Handing me a pair of shoes two-sizes-too-big, I waddle behind her as she guides me through the letterpress workshop. Gazing around the room at prints placed here and there, embellished with delicate decoration in perfect registration, I realise, reader, that letterpress has informed all I’ve ever done.

A strike of the match, an epiphany.

Kim Novak as Gillian Holroyd in Bell, Book and Candle (1958) dir. Richard Quine.

Naively, babe, I hadn’t come to realise in all those years I’d lauded over type, in print and painting and words etched in stone, that I was producing a copy of a copy, referencing contemporary modes of graphic design informed by historic, analogue processes. Walter Benjamin’s Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, all over again. Stood as a clown gazing at type cases neatly filled with lead and woodblock letters, I am handed a ‘composing stick’. Held hard in my palm as a firearm magazine, I cherry-pick serif lettering to compose a poem of mine own. Stood amongst strangers in that workshop, I came to experience for-the-first-time the physical weight of words.

With each and every letter added to that canister, babe, I felt my hand slip heavier and heavier and heavier, stiletto-shaped claws curling around its poison. It was only really then, reader, that I understood the levity within editing - each character, accent and flourishing ornament must be implemented with a sharp, considered precision. Every word matters.

In mine endless quest to test analogue processes, with All About Love still sitting at the forefront, I’ve been fortunately awarded the Sir Whitworth Wallis research fellowship with Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (BMaG). Obsessively combing over every Valentine within my wake, angel, I’ve become transfixed by Valentines, greetings and ‘blessings’ cards of the late Victorian age. Within their frilly paper lacing, gilded leaves and hand-pressed flowers lies a sinister, self-deprecating humour. This-past-week, I’d received the opportunity to hold these Valentines close, feel them in my palms and inspect their delicate lettering.

Trawling through paper sleeves, envelopes, books and boxes, I was completely taken by their decoration. It seems these Valentines exist in two forms: the less common, covered with doves, red roses and cherubs taking their aim, and the more frequent, tongue-in-cheek lithograph illustrations of couples with comical features, prancing along the page as thinly-veiled caricatures. Within that, angel, I’ve since discovered the phenomena of ‘Vinegar Valentines’, acidic gifts with mocking poetry “to give to someone you don’t like”, a figure gleefully tells me.

I think, now, about all the avenues that these opportunities have opened up for me. New ways of wishing, thinking, doing, being. A life sustained by imagination and, in time, practice. I consider what to put my hand to and feel taken by book making - the infinite potential which lies within its pages. The size, the shape, the paper weight, the finish, the bind, blind embossing, foil pressing, flocked velvet and so on. So many layers of meaning can be deduced from it. I think about gifting books, borrowing-and-never-giving-back books, creasing the cover, bending the spine, dog-earing each page - markers of an object well-loved.

In days to come, I’ll make again.