PEACHES!
Considering my theme of “protest art” - I knew I wanted to start out by looking at language and how words and typography can be used as powerful tools to effectively get a message across. Any song with a message behind it is a powerful example of this, so I started my project by looking at the work of musician and political activist PEACHES.
“I want people to understand that they can still have a voice no matter who they are or what the world says about them. Now more than ever, there are so many forces that just want you to give up and be quiet. If this album can help you resist that, then that’s what it’s for.”
- Peaches on her new album.
My initial process involved using tracing papaer to flip block capital letters, and carving out medium size lino blocks to print on an A4 page. I didnt pay much attention to the design of the font at this point, as my intention was merely to look at how this message sat on a page, and determine what illustrative qualities could be used here to help create effective political messaging.
After my intial prints, I scanned the pages in so I could move the letters around and have a greater degree of control over where the letters could actually end up on the page. The leftmost images here are the initial prints and the rightmost images are with better text alignment. This is something that using a letterpress could resolve, but this would likely also coincide with a complete change of aesthetic, as uniformity doesn’t always mean better.
EXPANDING ON THE DESIGN:
I thought about using digital tools to expand upon the phrase with some simple illustrations, but considering my “protest art” concept I really wanted to maintain a sense of genuine, made-at-home, messy-yet-clear and grassroots aesthetic that I think using linoleum to create typography like this is fantastic for.
So, I decided to print out my versions with improved/repositioned text and utilise recycled risograph masters to monoprint imagry over the text.
As we can see from the errors and fingerprint marks, I was initially VERY quick and messy with this - one of the massive pros of this method is that I can reproduce this “linocut base” to attempt numberous monoprints on, which alleviates some of the pressure that comes with a mistake ruining a large amount of work / time investment. However, I think there is still tremendous potential here.
I believe that the inherent bold and graphic qualities of block printmaking combine with the gestural and loose feeling that is afforded by this monoprint method can create a visually interesting design that could be very attention grabbing. I can see that this could also become too visually cluttered if too many colours are used or too much of the texture relief is added without thought - so I will be sure to keep my palette limited when using this method.
I really enjoyed this process
despite not knowing quite how they would turn out. I think my next steps are to try this method again (both digitally and traditionally) and try and utilise a mixture of masking take and reference imagery to give myself a greater degree of control over where the expressive markmaking is applied to the page.
READING:
https://www.teachesofpeaches.com/about