Honoured to have been included in the Project Passion exhibition at Minnesota State University. This year, they have the theme of  ‘collaboration’. As luck would have it, I was working on a collaborative project anyway, so the exhibition just added a deadline to it (always very helpful in getting things moving). The exhibition is running from September 18 to October 10, 2017.

My contribution is a series of letterpress prints created with the generous assistance of Clint Harvey at his Bacon Factory. The letterforms were hand and digitally drawn, then created using laser cut acrylic hand glued to plywood bases. All of the colours were custom mixed from a collection of vintage inks with a white base (to help with opacity). It was my first real letterpress experience, and it took way longer than I had anticipated. Even the creation of the custom blocks seemed to take forever with having to learn how to use the laser cutter, and generating multiple tests and experiments to get it right. But, the final printed images were definitely worth it.

The images are an extension of past work, in that I was interested in the diversity of letterforms. In this project, it was all about bringing together six different A’s and seeing what would happen by overlapping them in various configurations. We did do some tests with all six over each other, and while they looked amazing, the drying time required was just too much for the time we had. Due to my desire to have the forms as opaque as possible, the process requires several passes for each letter, and then a day to rest and dry before the next colour. In all, we created five different print combinations, with three being selected to the exhibition.

Looking at the included artists and designers, the exhibition is bound to be a really high quality collection. The way I can tell: when I go to stalk them on Instagram I’m already following most of them! Can’t wait until all the work is uploaded onto the site to see what else was included.