UAL/Clifford Chance Sculpture Award - two days of letterpress with Mary Dalton

If you've read the first post in this series you'll know that one part of my proposal was a freestanding lateral marker 'Welcome' buoy to stand at the top of the escalator at Clifford Chance HQ in Canary Wharf. The thinking behind this was that for millennia the main point of entry to London has been the River Thames. I feel quite familiar with parts of the Thames; I did my work experience at Romney Lock in Windsor aged 16 and this led to several summers working on the passenger boats that operate out of Windsor and Runnymede during 6th form and the university years. I regularly ventured as far upstream as Henley and downstream to Hampton Court, crewing to start with and then gaining my skipper ticket. It was a wonderful way to spend the summer holidays! I think this explains the sense of familiarity when I'm near the Thames, even the parts I'm less familiar with.

The first recorded mention of a buoy dates from the late 13th century but there is no doubt that they were in use earlier than this. Henry VIII formally granted a Royal Charter to Trinity House to manage navigational aids on the Thames Estuary; their remit has now increased to cover a huge variety of activities ensuring safe shipping throughout the UK. One such activity is providing and maintaining buoys. A lateral marker is a buoy that is placed to the side of a navigable channel, ports/rivers are marked as you enter/head upstream so when arriving from sea you leave green buoys to starboard (the right side) and red ones to port (the left side). As you enter Clifford Chance you have to turn left at the top of the escalator, therefore I need to make a starboard lateral marker (a green one). They look something like this (image from Trinity House website showing the massive scale of some of them).

My idea is to build a frame which will support a collage paper cover. This will be made out of letterpress prints saying 'Welcome'. It seemed obvious to me that this greeting will need to be in multiple languages since the docks were a multicultural place for both goods and people and Clifford Chance is an international law firm. I researched all the countries they are based in and the main language spoken in those places to guide my language selection.

The next hurdle, and the most exciting, was to find somewhere to actually make letterpress prints. I knew that West Dean had recently received a donation of a large set of letterpress type so I got in touch with Mary Dalton, an incredibly experienced, innovative and knowledgeable printmaker who runs the print studio there, to see whether I might be able to access the equipment and her knowledge of how to use it. West Dean were very kind (since I'm rather familiar with the place!) and gifted me access so I spent two days with Mary playing with lots of large wooden type.

Above are lots of pictures from the two days. The first pictures are the test print I started with and quickly learned that it's really easy to print letters the wrong way around! The letters all have to face backwards as they print in mirror image but some letters are very easy to accidentally reverse, this becomes even harder when using a foreign language so a lot of checking and double checking went on before pulling each print!

I had already stained some paper with green ink since I want the overall effect of the buoy to be green. I rather liked the watery ink-stained effect, as though the Thames has been washing and wearing the surface for years. The simple word prints will all be torn into their separate words and collaged using stitch to make the buoy. They'll be covered in a starch paste and crumpled using the Japanese method to make momigami (kneaded paper) for added strength and durability.

While I was printing them I also started playing with the type to see what else I could make. I had three different shades of green ink mixed and used the second pull, or ghost print, to get a paler impression and started layering these up. I really liked making grid like combinations with the English word 'welcome' as shown in the last picture. I want to make a series of these prints which might be displayed framed as part of the project. It also made me think about the possibility of representing the skyscrapers using numbers (since Canary Wharf is a financial hub) in smaller metal type.

On my first visit the metal type couldn't be used since the chases (a metal case that holds it in place when printing since it needs containing and fixing in place unlike the wooden type) needed repairing. This has now been done and apparently some new, bigger ones, have been donated to West Dean so I am heading back for another two days to continue this part of the project.

I'm really excited and grateful to have the opportunity to do this. One of my aims if I won the award was to expand my practice, I've never used letterpress before but always been fascinated by it. Printmaking has always been seen as a very democratic form of art since it allows multiples to be made therefore each copy can be cheap, which is also why it has been seen as 'lesser' than painting, and craft not art (hopefully we're getting over that now and more people are realising that printmaking is a whole extraordinary art form all of its own which allows marks to be made in a completely different way, marks that cannot be made by painting or drawing). Letterpress was the original way of mass-producing written information easily so part of the beginning of printmaking. I'm so grateful to be able to try it, and to learn from such an incredibly knowledgeable and inspirational teacher in Mary.