Making a lost word
This project began on a rainy Edinburgh day in August 2019. We had arranged to meet up and visit the exhibition of artwork from the Lost Words book at the Inverleith House Gallery in the Botanic Gardens. Outside the gallery was a crafts fair, we stopped at the Lettering Arts Trust stand where they were demonstrating letter cutting.
Two days later, an invitation arrived from the Lettering Arts Trust to take part in an exhibition based on the Lost Words book, how could we refuse?
A quick look at the list of available words, weasel has promise...
The words in the Lost Words book – and many others for that matter – while maybe not yet completely lost, are certainly becoming less visible threatening the poetic richness and depth of our language. Likewise cutting letters into stone by hand is not as commonplace as it once was to the detriment of the richness and depth of our visual environment. If ever there was the opportunity for synergy of medium and message, it is this.
In the course of our research we encountered the verb form of weasel meaning: ‘to deprive (a word or phrase) of its meaning’.
This seemed to embody the idea behind the Lost Words project and became a catalyst for our ideas.
The best collaborations work because of differences not in spite of them. With a London-based graphic designer (Mark) and a sculptor working in the Scottish Borders (Michelle) this collaboration had plenty of differences to thrive upon.
Initial correspondence was by email and phone talking about the directions we could explore with our chosen word. By the time we met for our first proper brainstorm in the conveniently half-way venue of York, our individual ideas were starting to fold into the collaborative space where they take on their own momentum.
Drawing and cutting letters into stone by hand takes time and dedication to master, patience and skill to execute. Typesetting words is quicker, sandblasting them is easier. With both approaches, the job gets done but our emotional engagement with the outcome is very different.
Our idea was to equate the loss of words from our language with a physical loss of hand-drawn and hand-cut letters. Over the shadows of the original words we sandblasted a new message in the most ordinary and ubiquitous of typefaces, Times New Roman.
The resulting palimpsest questions the relationship between craft and technology, between content, appearance, and meaning.
At every stage of the process we were unsure if it would work: would the sandblasting destroy the remains of the hand-cut letters; would the gilding look right; would we be able to get all this done in time?
But isn’t that the point of doing projects like this, to test the limits of imagination and your ability to produce something that has not be seen before?
Whether you work in stone by hand or with vector files on a screen, if you are writing a novel or a strapline for an advertisement what is most important is brilliantly executed originality. After all, without poetry and craftsmanship, meaning is lost.