When you practice a craft, particularly one as rich in tradition as letterpress, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that there’s only one way of doing things, and that straying away from the path known as ‘good practice’ defeats the purpose of the task. Over the last year, we’ve been collaborating with an artist who not only wanted to immerse herself in the history and techniques of printing (type, ink, paper, bookbinding), but also ultimately intended to deconstruct these traditions in order to create new forms.

Despite having experienced letterpress during her time at Glasgow School of Art and the RCA, Alida Kuzemczak-Sayer was keen to begin by reacquainting herself with the press room: composing type, locking-up formes, inking and pulling the press. Having refamiliarised herself with these techniques, a freer form of investigation could begin. Experiments with paper – often kozo (a light-weight stock, hand-made from Japanese mulberry) – tested its ‘tearability’ as well as its printing surface. Rubbings were taken from metal type, particularly the flowing forms of the script fonts. The inked surfaces of wooden type was disrupted with a shower of white spirit and the paintbrush-like strokes of leather dabbing rods that Alida had made for the purpose.

Eventually, the piles of printed sheets resulting from days of work that filled the studio’s drying racks would disappear, taken to Alida’s Norfolk studio to be reinterpreted. They would reemerge unrecognisable as awe-inspiring sculptures that play with the boundaries of the printed word. Setting out to use the tools of letterpress and respond to its traditions, while managing to create outcomes that feel original and unexpected is a formidable goal, but something that these artworks seem to do effortlessly.

The project culminates in Word Parts, an exhibition at Standpoint Gallery – an appropriate venue, being on the ground floor of the building that houses our studio where the works began to take shape – and was supported by Arts Council England and Henry Moore Foundation. New North Press has published a special catalogue to accompany the show.

It’s been a great pleasure to be involved in the project and we thoroughly recommend visiting the exhibition in person, and/or reading more about Alida’s work in the catalogue.

Word Parts
10 November – 9 December 2023
Standpoint Gallery
45 Coronet Street, London N1 6HD

All artworks and imagery by Alida Kuzemczak-Sayer. Photography by Philip Sayer.