Abstract Typographic Collagraphs

I have always been fascinated by the visual language of printing, especially the little pieces of machinery and process that most of us never notice. For these collagraphs, I wanted to get up close to typography and explore what happens when letterforms, halftone patterns, and color are pulled apart and then brought back together. I created each plate by hand from cardboard, cutting the forms and patterns into the surface and then printing each color separately. The idea was to create something that felt almost like a magnified fragment of a newspaper, where type, dots, edges, and color begin to lose their original purpose and become something more abstract. The process was slow and wonderfully unpredictable, and that unpredictability was really the point. I was less interested in making a perfect print than in discovering what might happen when the familiar language of typography was pushed into unfamiliar territory.