The artist and analogue film maker Saul Pankhurst has started a six-week residency at the iconic Robert Smail’s Printing Works in the Scottish Borders. His project Touch Type is hosted in a collaboration between Connecting Threads (the cultural strand of the landscape-scale initiative Destination Tweed) and the National Trust for Scotland.
According to Saul’s synopsis: Touch Type presents surviving letterpress practices as an extended metaphor to explore the importance of our physical closeness to the everyday language we use. Through a focus on diverse lived experiences, the work looks to highlight what might be lost or gained in the transition from tangible to digital interactions with language. Touch Type records the physicality of the machines and the lived experiences of those who have worked their whole life with the physical entity of the letterpress. The work also interweaves the voices of those who have felt themselves affected by the transitioning use of their language. Together the machines and the voices merge the experiences and reflections of different generations to provide a free-flowing discourse on the broad applications of language and how related technologies shape its use through their temporal and material characteristics.
Touch Type will use interactive models of presentation (moving image, installation, printmaking and photography) to engage audiences with the wider, universal themes of identity, memory, obsolescence and change.
Robert Smail’s opens its doors for the season on 1 April 2023.
Saul will hold two Open Studios on Friday 7and Friday14 April between 3-5pm.
Please check NTS website and Facebook for details and booking.