TYPOGRAPHY | RESEARCH
Emily is hopeful, 2022, 33" x 45" giclee print
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Work in progress for “Sustainable Activism: A visual study of words connected to climate change”. This project is partly influenced by the takeaways from a sobering environmental text by Tomás Maldonado titled “Design, Nature, & Revolution, Toward a Critical Ecology”.
The words are cut on recycled plexiglass and hung in staggered positions to cast light and color on the wall. While the reflective colors are visually intriguing, it belies the grim message.
Emily uses Dashes, 2022, 33" x 45" giclee print
Typography Studies
My interest in expressive and informative typography extends back to my graduate thesis, and for me, typography is a powerful tool for visual communication and conveying emotions and ideas. Shown here are two different typographic studies.
The first study (shown below) results from studying sustainable design, climate change, and the significant challenges of making positive, sustainable impacts. I designed a series of words and phrases that allude to sustainability to process the doom and gloom associated with a changing environment. Many of the words suggest the things humans could be doing better. The first example uses words that are laser-cut on recycled plexiglass. The final forms are visually vibrant and colorful and interact with light and background in intriguing ways, but the message, in contrast, is quite heavy.
To view the earth in a more positive light, I turned to the hopeful poems of Emily Dickinson, who was noted for themes of love and nature and her unusual use of dashes and punctuation. The second project shown here is two posters exploring a feeling I call climabloat—distress over impending climate changes and the accompanying sense of hopelessness. Woven in with Dickinson’s poetry are short secondary phrases such as SOS and ACT NOW, plus brief scientifically proven climate notes and statistics. Her poetry, printed posthumously, uses corrected punctuation, although I like to think she was intentionally playing with punctuation and wouldn’t mind that I’m playing with it too.