Abstracting a Rock

All the Caslon ‘O’s at Spike Print Studio

This series of postcards started as a failure. I was nearing the end of my residency at Spike Print Studio, so was feeling comfortable in the space – knowing where things were and having become friends with the Vandercook press. I often turned up not really knowing what I was going to print, or with only the vaguest idea of a plan. This was a helpful strategy as it allowed for surprise. I suspected at the time that it also meant that failure was a more likely outcome from my two days a week of printing, than success.

Quartz lines on a large rock on the beach at Bucks Mills

Over the summer of 2023 I’d been noticing patterns in the rocks and pebbles on the beach at Bucks Mills: the lines of quartz, the scars left by limpets, and the barnacles that advance and retreat in response to conditions. I had the idea of flattening out this rock syntax of quartz, old scars and barnacles, into a kind of abstraction of a rock... reducing the elements to the bare minimum. At the same time, I would try inking in different ways to create texture, and vary a single element to see what would happen. Could the prints create or say something new about the rocks and pebbles on Bucks Mills beach.

Marks, or scars, left by limpets returning to the same spot after feeding

I used two different grey card stocks – colorplan and colorset (both 270gsm) – as the rock base, as this matched the shale rock. I started with the lighter colorset but it seemed too light in colour, so swapped it for the darker colorplan grey. The final piece includes only the darker version. (Now, in retrospect, maybe a combination of two or more shades could have worked even better?)

Early print on light card

Metal letterpress rule, bent gently round letterpress furniture became the quartz lines over the rock. This created some texture from the beginning, as rule makes a deeper impression than type. I used wood type to create the limpet scars, overprinting them with textured black and opaque white ink, playing about with over-inking and “bad” inking. The barnacles were set and printed over the course of two consecutive days, using all the uppercase and lowercase ‘O’s I could find in the Caslon cases. I included a random sans-serif ‘O’ which looks like it belongs with gill sans or granby light (neither of which is in the Spike Print Studio collection). The variations came from the letterpress rule (I tried various configurations), the inking of the wood type, and the position and colour of the Caslon ‘O’s.

Darker card, more interesting limpet home-scars, and double rule lines….

I liked individual elements of the final print: the impression of the rule, the variable inking of the wood type, and the configuration of the Caslon ‘O’s. The monochrome prints were pleasingly graphic. However, the overall impression was just... meh. I had attempted to abstract a rock, and all I’d done was to make it look boring and flat. There was a feeling of having wasted four precious days (two weeks) of printing. It didn’t seem worth trying the experiment again.

Over the weeks that followed I tried cropping to A4, which was my original intention for the print. No improvement. I tried over-printing with some other text... but it became too busy. I set the prints aside in the pile marked “challenging learning experiences” and tried not to think about it anymore.

Three months later, as I was preparing for my end-of-residency exhibition at Spike Print Studio I found the pile of prints again. I wondered how they would look as postcards and got out the guillotine. A few minutes later I had four postcards, then eight, then 12. Without really thinking about it, I’d cut the cards in different ways... and as the cards fell across the worktop they created new patterns and connections. I did a double-take, then tried laying them out across the table-top. From just three elements – printed with very little variation – a seemingly endless range of possibilities had become available. The effect is surprisingly similar to walking across the pebbles of the beach at Bucks Mills.

The letterpress printed syntax of the rocks in Bucks Mills at the end of residency exhibition at Spike Print Studio  in October 2023

It wasn’t until the exhibition itself that I realised that the postcards made a set. A few people asked to buy specific cards, and I realised that I couldn’t split them. They belonged together. It now feels like a prototype for an artist’s book, where the cards are contained within a box and can be arranged in different configurations.