Letterpress is my lodestar. I've never tired of seeing a page come of the press, or of the smell of ink, or the feel of a piece of well-used wood type. The technique of letterpress printing-the impression of type into the loft of a sheet of paper-allows the letterforms a sculptural quality, a luminosity-printers refer to a page that sparkles and breathes. In my work, I strive for that sparkle, and for surprise. My working process allows for the slow generation of objects in which form and content have been intimately attended to at every step. I aim to reach the highest standards of craftsmanship in typography and presswork, seeking out old manuals and equipment otherwise destined for the scrap yard. I hope that in my work I can extend the tradition of letterpress while incorporating it with unexpected or unusual techniques and technologies in order to make something beautiful and new.
My path toward becoming a letterpress printer was a circuitous one. I moved to the US in 1994 with a suitcase, planning to be gone a year. Eleven years later, I returned to Melbourne with a twenty-foot container-load of press equipment, and a desire to re-establish the studio I'd left behind. In between times, I completed academic degrees and an apprenticeship. I taught letterpress and bookmaking at the San Francisco Center for the Book and the Cleveland Institute of Art. I established Idlewild Press, specialising in photographic artist books. In June this year, I moved into a studio on the sixth floor of the Nicholas Building at 37 Swanston Street.
I'm often asked: why do this? Why set type letter by letter when digital technologies allow cheap, fast, high-quality printing? Why print at all when information is so easily communicated by e-mail or SMS or the web? As a craftsperson, it is easy to fall back on aesthetics as a stock answer to this question. Of course, aesthetics can't help but be a motivating factor in a decision to pursue such work. I love the look and feel of the things I make. However, this is only part of the answer. During the year my equipment was in storage, I came to realise how important printing is in my life: that it's like getting eight hours of sleep, or running five miles on the elliptical trainer, or remembering to take my contact lenses out at night. It's both a necessary and deeply satisfying activity to me. Without it, I lose the strongest connection I have between my head and my hands.
This connection is an ethical one. How do I want to spend my time? What do I want to produce, leave behind? How can I honour the legacy of the craftspeople before me: my predecessors and teachers? What do I want to say, and how best can I say it?
Making a book is much like building a house: many small decisions both contingent and dependent. It's a form that allows for a sequential unfolding of ideas and concepts; that has rhythm and movement that can be controlled and directed like music or breath. Printing books by letterpress is slow, ruminative and meditative. At this speed, I'm able to uncover processes and solutions that would be lost to me working any faster: a consideration of the extra space between a final w and a beginning y, the shape of the rag of an unjustified page, the rhythm of images interspersed within text. For a writer, there's no sharper lesson in learning to edit one's own work, and no greater pleasure than being able to rewrite a sentence to allow for a better line-break or more beautiful shape on the page or a new thought that only just evolved in the moment of handling a piece of type. In deciding on the proportions of a page, the design of a binding, the choice of a typeface, I want to communicate a greater whole, divorced from commercial imperatives or hindrances. I want that proportional relationship, or the shape of a certain letter or the feel of a fine cloth or paper to facilitate a reading experience that heightens and intensifies the experience of reading so that it's not just words, but this object: this world. Printing allows me to give form to work that would not exist otherwise and could not be produced any other way without radically changing its intent and effect. This work is about the process of printing as much as it is about an idea or concept. Printing, for me, isn't just a tool or a technique in the service of the work: it's the conduit through which I discover what my work really is and how best to bring it into being.
