As part of my residency at The University of Bath I kept walking past the old printing press standing in the Library lobby, I discovered it was Sir Isaac Pitman's original press, that he produced the marketing material for his shorthand writing technique.

With no previous printing experience I began making some printing blocks, linocut and woodcut, based around my growing understanding of the press and shorthand. Luckily, with the help of expert printer Richard Lawrence who came to Bath especially, we managed to get the printer working again to produce prints off the blocks.

As the printer was at the entrance of a working 24hr library we were only allowed to work in the quieter evenings so spent one night, from 6pm-2am turning the lobby into a print studio. 

Above: The prints installed in 'Sociable Hermit', The Edge, University of Bath, 2015

Above: The two main prints in the series, of my phonetic text and my carving of the printer, were purchased by the University so I devised a framing system based on the way these prints acted like a diptych mirroring each other.

Bespoke wooden frames were painted, one white frame half painted black, one black frame half painted white. Mountboard in opposite colour to the inks used, and the paper offset in each frame.

This version was titled 'Dnah, Dnuos Eht (The Sound Hand), after as phrase Pitman used to describe his shorthand system.