As my MFA in Fine Art approaches its conclusion, I am emerging from a period of enthusiastic investigation of the possibilities and potential of typeface and typewriters. And I have been asking myself how can I push this yet further.
It has seemed to me that, in the context of my current project, a typewriter has given me a tool to access and investigate the following:
Mechanical, repetitive process (and sound)
A parallel and complimentary form of “old” technology that was once cutting edge but now carries a sense of nostalgia and, perhaps, eccentricity; the same can be said of railways, too, I think – especially disused or lost ones. (And yet, as my projects seek to argue, there is also richness and value and potential in them nonetheless!)
A limited set of options (compared to modern word processing, computing and digital printing technology) – something stripped back to basics, simple and rather “retro” – that quality of older technology again.
Something decidedly analogue and physical (compared to the digital and the electronic) that again chimes nicely with railways and, critically, their construction, preservation and restoring. It’s all done by hand (manual labour) in both cases (typewriting, working to clear the Amlwch line).
These are all valuable things to investigate, as I believe I have done. So, how can I now take this further? How can I start to mix these “typewriter” qualities with other strands of my work. How can I think it deeper and further?
A wander around some of the old railway sites of Oxford took me recently to Grandpont Bridge (above), on the Thames. It used to carry railway lines to a long-gone gasworks and other industrial sites. No trains have passed over it for many a year. It may even date back to the days of Brunel’s broad gauge. It is now a rather over-engineered pedestrian bridge, but still very grand and imposing.
Again, I was struck by ideas of the mechanical and the repetitive, this time as I pondered the thousands of rivets inserted in the great Victoria girders. I was also struck by the rust and patina. It struck me as the very slowest form of decay and dissolution that I felt I could imagine in a human time frame.
How could I apply this sense of dissolution in the context of typewritten work? I wanted to think about whether I could simultaneously point to decay in thinking about typewriting. It seemed right to try to balance the two, since my work seems so full of these dichotomies (I am tempted to say parallel tracks).
These thoughts percolated through to beginning to think about dots: tiny fragments of line, if you will, that also point to dust, smoke, sand and particles – things falling to bits/dissolving, or perhaps things falling together/coming back into focus. It seemed fitting that it all seemed so loose, ill-defined and hard to grasp.
As is so often the case, I needed to think this through with a drawing.
Choosing a piece of tracing paper, for no other reason than that it has been a common feature in my work and also adds to the idea of “tracing” a disappearing thing (and a surface with its own contingency, fragility, translucency) I sat down to draw with no real sense of where I was going. Just a basic idea of turning type to dust.
First steps: tracing the seven railway stations of the Amlwch line. A route to follow, or to search for. I used fibre tip marker pens of varying sizes between 0.05cm and 0.8cm.
I thought I might use pencil or charcoal but I felt it was too messy and imprecise, even though they are really “dust” (soot, carbon). I didn’t want to lose control to that extent. I drew on, tracing on the typed letters imperfectly (to suggest imperfect processes and gradual dissolution) and then worked to build a “cloud” of dots around the frail and failing text to make it even more contingent and on the point of dissolution. I laid down more and more dots to reinforce this, eventually going much further with this than I originally imagined, in order to make the legibility of the typeface even more uncertain.
That really was my only impulse other than to see how the drawing turned out. I was still not sure where I was going with this, or whether I even liked what was emerging. I felt like I should just surrender to the process and allow the drawing to be what it would be.
However, there came a point where I finally understood what I was doing, as if the dots were coalescing into an independent idea beyond my own agency. This is the final, completed piece:
“Uncertain Journey”
Completed 10 July 2020. Pen on tracing paper. H263 mm x W410mm
So what is this then?
As I drew, around a dozen potential titles for this piece came to me as it began to resolve itself in the making, and I jotted them down for consideration at the end. It was a way of indexing my thinking and my reactions to what I was doing, I believe. Other titles, each resonating with some aspect of my continuing research and emerging body of work, were:
“Every journey is made of a million tiny steps”
Make/Unmake/Remake
Coming Apart/Coming Together
A Million Small Acts
A Miliion Tiny Acts of Remembrance
Don’t Forget to Remember
Uncertain Destinations
I finally chose “Uncertain Journey” , a title that reflects both the outcome and the journey of this piece.
The process of laying down the dots (once the lettering was done) was instinctual and implied a real sense of surrender to the mechanical, rhythmic and repetitive process of the dotmaking. It felt, again, like the process of riveting in its obsessive repetition; albeit on a quieter and less industrial scale. And it felt as though the shapes and textures were finding their own form, independent of me. This was a highly mindful and thought-provoking piece to do. Isn’t the act of drawing so often like that?
There is, in the final drawing, a pleasing ambivalence about its nature, which I enjoy and value. Speaking to others for their reaction on what it is (always stipulating there I felt there was no single right answer), I was struck by the following principal reactions:
wind on sand at low tide
tides of the water
steam, smoke or dust
tree roots, trunk, branches and leave
the murmurations of starlings
I particularly like that these are all natural phenomena and that they are perceived beyond or above the lettering which seems no longer the central premise of the work – a nice visual metaphor for forgetting, and for the gradual reclamation of the line by nature, perhaps.
I feel sure that this piece is, not for the first time, about being on the fine line between forgetting and remembering; and that something as concrete and humanly regulated as a journey down a railway line becomes something as complex, uncertain as these phenomena beyond human regulation (but nonetheless regulated according to the rigorous system of physics).
That all fits quite nicely with my overall approach to this project as I consider it in July 2020, nearly four months after the coronavirus made this project, too, into another kind of uncertain journey.