Here are a few pictures from my collaboration with typographer Jamie Murphy of Salvage Press and artist James Earley to produce an illuminated version of my poem Liffey Swim. You can see a slightly different version of the series in the No. 9 bar in the Workman’s Club.
A few weeks ago I had the chance to visit James and Jamie at the printing room in NCAD to see behind the scenes, and also to sign some proofs. Typesetting is a fascinating and very difficult artform and I was intrigued to see that the tools and materials that they work with have changed very little over the past few hundred years. One of the more humbling aspects of the whole project was being told that the paper for the project was one of the last shipments from an Italian papermaking company that had just closed after being in business for 500 years.
I was also really impressed with James’s artwork, which manages to be both sinuous and choppy, organic and fragmented – you’ll have seen his stuff opposite the Project Arts Centre, at the George Bernard Shaw and on Blooms Hotel. Keep an eye out for their work at The Salvage Press and Inputout.
Jessica Traynor 