Lichenism I

This letterpress printed artist’s book is part of the Allyship portfolio, a collection of eight letterpress printed books by ten women artists, organised by the Centre for Print Research (UWE) in collaboration with Artlab Contemporary Print Studio (ACPS) at the University of Lancashire.

I made letterpress ink from local earth pigments, and from laked botanical dyes made from kitchen waste and plants grown in my garden. I am developing a kind of material ecopoetry, where the more-than-human and human elements make meaning on the page together. Or rather, I wanted to make the more-than-human elements more visible on the page – which is why I made the ink.

The large wood letter texts in yellow are printed using clay from the subsoil of my garden, and read: reciprocity, polyphony, immanence. The ‘O’s are printed with ochre from the cliffs at Peppercombe beach and remind me of algae, or perhaps the apothecia (fruiting bodies) of lichen. The metal letterpress printed texts are a combination of texts: some from letters between Mary Stella Edwards and Judith Ackland from the Ackland and Edwards archive, some are from the many definitions of lichens that lichenologists struggle to write, and some from the ‘What the Lichen Said’ print. Together they create a lichenistic polyphony of voices in allyship.

The Allyship portfolio has been exhibited at Woolwich contemporary print fair, at Allanbank, Grasmere, and many other places.