First edition of 50
24 x 36” hand pulled screen print on Coventry Rag
Available in the store here
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The perpetuated illusion is that having a full time, 9—5 working situation is the easy way out, and somehow safer than going it alone. For me at least, that has never been the case.

Forcing good, creative work into a traditional 40 hour week while being beholden to other people’s schedules and the constant distractions of an office environment is far harder than running my own business. On top of that, I know several talented people who have been let go without so much as a handshake recently, so to assume you’re safe in your job is foolish and you may as well get out on your own terms. CW

A legibility experiment conducted in collaboration with Jason Tozer. 20 sheets of glass were screen printed and captured in various states of destruction.

ISBN: 9781389725517
Available for purchase here.

Over the summer of 2017 myself, Fanny Josefsson and Ilana Wolstein discovered a mutual admiration for the abstract — and frequently profound — sentences generated by repeated use of the predictive text bar on Apple’s iOS. 

Predictive text draws from a library of each user’s most frequently used words to contextually suggest three words most likely to follow another. In doing so, it creates a fragmented recollection of messages we have already sent; a broken portrait of us and how we communicate. 

To create the poems, an initial word was chosen and from there, the predictive text library was navigated with a choice of only three words at a time. To maintain the flow of writing, punctuation and line breaks were generally added afterwards. 

In essence, this becomes a form of restricted writing, akin to the minimalist poets of the 20th Century. The results are at times clumsy or childlike, occasionally falling into a feedback loop, while others present us with truly poetic, existential observations.

Over the summer of 2015, I rode the trains of each of New York City's 22 subway lines, collecting bacterial samples from hand rails, seats and other high traffic surfaces. 

The samples were taken using sterilized sponges that had been pre-cut into the letter or number of the subway line from which the sample was to be taken - A, C, 1, 6 etc etc. The swabs were then pressed into pre-poured agar plates - their circular shape echoing the graphic language of the subway - and incubated for up to a week in my workshop, and photographed at various stages of development before being safely neutralized and disposed of.

The resulting images are a portrait of the city's complex ecosystem that each of us contribute to and an excellent visual analogy for the subway and city at large. They hopefully also serve as a reminder that in a city that can make you feel small, there are countless billions of smaller inhabitants.

The resulting series - entitled Subvisual Subway - presents a unique and fascinating snapshot of the city's complex microbial ecosystem that each of us are a part of, and offers a chance for people to get a closer look at their fellow commuters.

An exploration of the ideas and terminology within the field of theoretical physics. As an attempt to bring these abstract concepts to life in a simple manner, I limited myself to a single typeface and 2 colors — black and white.

CGI sketches for physical installations
2017

A personal exploration into shaping letterforms using just light sources and cuts in surfaces.

In part inspired by the works of artists James Turrell and Dan Flavin, the hope is to realize these in three dimensions at some point soon.

2012 - 2013
Living edge wood, pyrography, gold leaf

The PAGAN series continues my preoccupation with the juxtaposition of clean, classically designed typography with the chaos of natural processes and organic materials. When combined, these aspects create a visual tension; a conversation between the typography and the surface, with each jostling for visual dominance. 

The subject matter for the series is Pagan and Heathen terminology from the Old English dialects of 5th to 12th Century Britain. Pagan and Heathen in this context are taken to mean “country dweller” or “rustic” - without intending to invoke the religious connotations applied since the 20th century.

The typography was applied by hand using a method known as pyrography - a centuries old arts and crafts technique used for decoration, with the earliest surviving examples in Britain dating back to the 4th century. 

Pagans traditionally wrote very little down, preferring to pass on stories and learnings by word of mouth - allowing me to treat the type freely. Tree worship was common in their culture, they believed them to be sacred and offered a way to communicate with nature. Here I have taken the words that they spoke in front of the trees and made them as one. As the pieces age over time, my hope is that it will appear as if the two have always existed together.

When is a typeface more than a typeface?

In 2015 I once again collaborated with pioneering biochemist and experimental photographer Linden Gledhill, this time for the creation of a conceptual, ornamental type system and a series of accompanying, one-of-a-kind letterpress prints.

The project, Fe2O3 Glyphs, aimed to not only transcend the traditional role of a typeface - to provide a consistent and coherent platform for communication - but to completely invert it. The design of the characters is given over to an evolving, unrepeatable process involving ferrofluid, and the ‘grid’ at the heart of the typeface is generated by conflicting magnetic field lines. Crucially, the medium dictates the forms of the typeface, as opposed to the other way around.

The result is a complex series of hieroglyphics - each one as unique as a snowflake - that call to mind both ancient indigenous markings and symbols from science fiction. These forms were traced as vectors and cast as both a working .otf typeface and also as a unique moveable type printing system, combinations of which will be used to create a series of one off prints where no arrangement of glyphs is ever repeated. To bring the project full circle, the prints will be created using a mixture of actual ferrofluid and Pantone Pure Black printers ink.

The Fe2O3 Glyphs project perfectly marries contemporary scientific process with a centuries old printing process. It questions what a typeface is and what it can be. The prints and typeface will be available through a Kickstarter campaign launching at the end of this month and ending on September 30th.

Personal pieces exploring letterforms, strokes, color and balance.

A stencil serif typeface created in 2010. 

I've always said you should take inspiration from whatever surrounds you, and these days I'm surrounded by kids — we welcomed our second daughter into the world in late 2016. As such, I'm reading a lot of children's books and I've become intrigued by it as medium for expression.

My first completed story is a minimalist odyssey entitled 'An Adventure' and concerns a the journey of a would-be hero who, on his return, finds things have changed without him, for better and for worse. I'm not convinced about the commercial viability of the project but if you'd care to know more or might be interested in putting it out there, feel free to get in touch.