In late March 2020, Aotearoa was given 48 hours notice before the country went into what we called the Level 4 lockdown. Everything closed. No-one could leave their house except to exercise (by themselves) or buy food or necessities. Only essential workers could go to a workplace.
Diatom Press is run by scientist and printmaker Joe Buchanan. Joe has a PhD in seaweed or marine macroalgae (you can see it with the naked eye) which fulfilled his childhood ambition of being a marine biologist. He has great admiration for things that survive in awkward places – seaweed, liverworts, dinoflagellates. He spent his youth printing pamphlets and posters for various human rights campaigns. He lives in Paekākāriki with the writer, Maria McMillan (whose work features in some of Joe’s prints), their two children, a cat called Tuesday and a fledgling native moss garden.
I always wanted to cut a large alphabet. It is really hard to get large wooden type these day so I thought I’d cut one in lino and, because I was thinking about The Lockdown and the Covid-19 crisis, I wanted to respond to that and comment on it.
I usually tend towards serif types but there’s something simple and symbolic about large sanserif display types which really appeals to me just because of their simplicity. They’re not necessarily easy because if you cut a serif type, it’s actually easier to hide your mistakes in the serifs and the complex curves. I wanted something just simple and bold, and one that just has the alphabet reduced to the simplest forms, the simplest shapes.
In many ways The Lockdown Alphabet is me going back to my early days: the first public art I really did was protest banners, simple slogans and pithy texts.
