My work explores symbolism and patterns. This is the first in a series of four prints created in 2023, dealing with Tennyson’s “Lady of Shalott,” a classic Romantic poem with unsettling undertones. The background fields employ a grammar of symbolic references to the poem, each building toward and contributing to the final panel, which deals with the fulfillment of the curse in the death of the Lady.?
The ornaments were cut by Robert Granjon (1513-1590), and their arrangement into patterns is unique to each print. Interestingly, these unusual glyphs have persisted long enough in our visual consciousness to be revived in modern type-metal and ultimately digitized. This duality allows me to experiment physically and digitally to examine many iterations before narrowing in on a suitable visual grammar. My ultimate goal is to present an idea or text in a way that has never been seen before yet still seems familiar. ?
The typesetting is reminiscent of books of the High Renaissance. The series is comprised of four prints, each in an edition of 25, hand-set in metal type and manually printed letterpress.