Thoughts about text after my first attempt at screen printing

I attended my first screen printing class at East Side Print in Kemptown, Brighton, yesterday. Screen printing has always intrigued me, and countless ideas for screen prints are scattered throughout my notebooks. I tend to become fixated on certain turns of phrases or words, and what appeals to me is how the meaning of a word can transform through layering or when combined with an image. How the act of layering or repeating often obliterates the original intent of a phrase. What I’m looking for by screenprinting text is playing with meanings inside a physical and metaphysical container or a frame. I’ve realized that creating containers for ideas is something I spend my life doing. A book becomes a container for a world, a script houses a life, and a poem encapsulates a specific moment. I’m also an avid collector of objects with stories, and my house is full of salvaged museum cabinets like this one:

I forgot to take a photo of my first screen print (silly of me). It was a paper cut on newsprint featuring a line from a poem I’m working on. Trust me, it didn’t look as neat as below (or anything like below!), and I struggled with the cutout and setup. Sometimes, I feel that fate has dealt me an unnecessarily challenging hand because I’m a dyslexic who loves a process, a formula, and writing! However, despite the challenges, I found the experience gratifying and humbling. Typically, putting words on a page comes naturally to me (though editing is a different story), but this was new territory. Anyway, this is how I envisioned it looking:

Another aspect of screen printing that strongly appeals to me is the symbolism of cutting something away from the page. It isn’t easy to fully articulate why this is so attractive. Still, it’s a deep compulsion to distill an explanation through the process of reduction—cutting away, forging my path toward meaning. So, it’s a combination of layering and subtracting, which may seem contradictory, but considering that we spend our lives accumulating layers of knowledge and experiences, only to eventually reach a point where we yearn to simplify, shed burdens, and rediscover the essence of who we were and what we loved as children. It was always about ink, scissors, paper, and stories.

Have a great week, everyone.