UAL/Clifford Chance Sculpture Award - back to West Dean for more letterpress

I am so lucky, I was able to go back to West Dean for a further two days with Mary Dalton to expand the work I had begun with the wooden type. This time I was using the metal type to create skyscraper imagery using letters and numbers.

Metal type needs to be contained in a chase so once I'd laid out all the letters where I wanted them Mary showed me how to fix them in place with a lot of other pieces which sat lower and therefore wouldn't print. It was similar to a jigsaw puzzle, but one without a definitive solution. Fortunately Mary is an excellent puzzle solver - it turns out that setting the chases is very time consuming, especially when you're using a mixture of fonts and making shapes rather than readable, uniform text!

Once everything was in place I could ink up the letters and print them, then I'd re-ink, move them around and go again. I took ghost prints (second impressions without re-inking) and used three different colours to build up layer upon layer of images. We printed some solid backgrounds on the first day, leaving them to dry overnight before printing on the following day.

I was really pleased with the results and looking forward to turning these into collaged buildings.

While I was there I decided to get the wooden type out again and have another play with the word 'Welcome', abstracting it almost to the point that you can't understand it. This seemed to echo something of the history of the arrivals to the docks, London and the wider UK throughout history: those invited and then shunned, those welcomed as friends who turned out to be hostile, those who should have been welcomed but were turned away. It would seem that in researching the history of one small area in London I've stumbled into seeing the echoes of human behaviour in the past mirrored in today's immigration policies and thinking about the similarities and differences both through time and across the globe.

And there was me thinking that this was all about saltmarshes, tidal estuaries and land use. What a fascinating and mind-opening journey I am on!