■Inspiration

I explored the extensive world of textiles, prints and textures from different angles in search for my inspiration and came across a certain craftsman, Kinnosuke Shimizu. As one of the last living letterpress punchcutters in Japan, I was inclined to visit him to see his work firsthand.

In the era of letterpress printing, letters were carved in reverse into hard metal from which matrices holding forward-faced impressions of the letters were made for type founding. Cutting such punches was obviously a highly skilled craft that required a great deal of practice and patience but the need had quickly diminished through the course of industrialization in the 1950s.

Shimizu, now 88 years old, spoke of how he lost his job as new machines and technologies took over and how some jobs inevitably become obsolete as times change but renewed interest in the craftsmanship of handmade typography had brought him back to practice. Fascinated by his fated career, timeless artisanal skills and the technique of using convex and concave molds, I was inspired to portray the ups and downs of life through a textured graphical print design with a play on light and shadows.