Scratching Beneath the Surface

Artist’s Book

This book grew from an exploration of the idea of visual text beyond letters and typography. All around us in the world are symbols or gestures, sights and sounds that we are communicating with, and being communicated to, every waking moment.

Inspired by the Lucie Rie exhibition at Kettle’s Yard, The Adventure of Pottery (2023), I interwove my own photographs of Rie’s pots, and the gallery space at large, with an extract from the book Restart: New Systems in Graphic Design, in particular the essay by Christian Kusters.

Kusters wrote:

“Language is anything that communicates information. Type is no longer merely the letters and punctuation marks that form words, sentences and paragraphs, but the building blocks of meaning in whatever form that meaning arises.

Type can be colour. Adopt this view and immediately ever around you becomes part of a vocabulary. Non-alphabetic typographies range from contained, consistent systems to such unregulated sets of information as architecture and fashion.

The idea that all communication is in some sense typographic has its roots in semiology. Semiologists suggest that anything - symbols, images, social myths, can be read.

You can extrapolate from this that if it can be read, it must be language. One step further, it emerges that if it is a language, then its expression must be typographic.”