WELCOME TO KIRKCUDBRIGHT LETTERPRESS

A new year, a new start (January 2024)

So what is this? A new year, a new start and I'm now able to focus on art full time. This started out as a printshop in my garage but has now progressed somewhat. This is not a commercial printshop though. We do not make business cards, wedding stationary, greeting cards or invites. Kirkcudbright Letterpress is about creating works of Fine Art Typography.

I've had a lifelong interest in combining images with the printed word and I have always enjoyed the use of visual language as a form of art. In particular, I like languages that use pictorial elements, iconography and glyphs. I love Egyptian Hieroglyphs and have a degree in Egyptology, I also love history and have a master's degree in Museum and Art Gallery Studies. My career started in reprographics, website design and application development and this background and a love of drawing, carving and creating led me to wanting a physical space where I could create works using traditional printing methods.

There's also a sense of history and preservation here. Nothing in the studio is electrical, everything is physical and manually operated. There is a tactile history to most things in the studio, they have led a life already and wear the scars.



I do not aim for perfection! No two prints are exactly the same and no print is perfect. This is intentional, the dents and scratches in the vintage wooden type add a unique feel to each print. This is the mantra of my studio... "This is art, not reprographics!"

Just to reiterate, this is not a commercial print shop and I won't be taking orders or working on commissions or setting up long print runs. I will be creating individual one off artworks that use an element of letterpress, paper making and ink making. To put that into a form of mission statement Kirkcudbright Letterpress Studio is;