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typing... (2025) uses copperplate etching and letterpress to investigate the tension between incidental mark making, automatic typing and the surface of the matrix. In contrast to digital typing, ancestral letterpress type appears obsolete, yet the process of setting text letter by letter and in reverse produces an unexpected, automatic form of writing. Unlike handwriting or keyboard input, this typesetting is unthinking, vulnerable and direct, as words seem to crawl out one after another. The copper plate becomes a second site of inscription. Transfer, etching and printing introduce multiple reversals, while etched self portraits act as receptacles for chance and spontaneity, allowing process to generate new meanings or obscure existing ones. The resulting images are visually and texturally complex, closely bound to their matrix through reflection and reversal.
Within the context of this exhibition, typing... responds to the 2017 QCAD folio box Tension, which orbits an opening quote by Antoni Tàpies on the equilibrium that emerges from the struggle between idea and material. The artist engages this lineage by treating both type and plate as surfaces for thinking, allowing the collision of thought and process in the studio to remain visible in the finished print. In doing so, the work reflects the capacity of the folio box to capture these moments of negotiation between intention and material reality, while extending Tension through a contemporary exploration of writing, automatism and the etched image.
