Where to start? By writing and drawing our manifesto of course!
Cardboard: the ubiquitous material of lockdown!
Our postcards, fresh from the printers, next to the original sketch.
The responses have been beautiful. Not only the sentiments, but also the handrwitten/drawn form. This became our departure for play and experimentation!
Using the actual handwriting of our neighbours led us to what seemed like a natural step forward: taking letters from each completed postcard to create our Neighbourhood Font. In our original proposal to Glasgow Life for the Creative Communities: Artist in Residence Programme, we explained that we wanted to “explore the language and landscape of hope”. It feels to us that this is exactly that.
Today, 11th May 2021 was all about preparing for some up-coming Anchor Lab sessions in local schools. Cardboard and imagination were the main ingredients!
Our screen printed tea towels are our gifts to our neighbours, free for anyone to take home and keep as a souvenir of this residency and the work completed together with local residents. We wanted them to reflect something of everyone’s responses to the question “What Anchors You?” so we created paper stencils for screen printing taken from sections of the handwriting found on the completed postcards. We changed the scale, worked with the negative shapes and and isolated fragments of text so that the handwriting became abstract patterns. We layered these patterns up, combining them so that many ‘voices’ could be ‘heard’ on each towel. Colours were selected from the film Singin’ In The Rain, as watching this and other nostalgic old films is one of the things that Anchor Lab artist Lynsey found anchored her through the time spent in lockdown with her family. We worked intuitively, energetically and colloboratively to create 60 unique designs, some of which can be seen here.
