Sophie Pickering
My design practice is guided by a process led approach, exploring themes iteratively and curiously with a focus on materiality, composition, pattern, and experimental typography through various analogue and digital methods.
Call and Response i
This work explores jazz improvisation as a conversation between two musicians, conceptualised in response to a YouTube session between Alfa Mist and Yussef Dayes (keys and drums). Through abstracted typographic compositions, I attempt to visualise implicit and non-verbal methods of communication: the glances and gestures that create an almost telepathic connection between a pair while playing.
Building on the idea that improvisation is not random, rather an event of re-piecing what already exists, I present two rearranged instances of the same composition, as if individual and unreplicable performances.
Call and Response ii
Reformatting the same imagery as Call and Response i, this hand-printed book (letterpress gradients and screenprint) invites the reader to become a participant in the event of improvisation. Double binding allows for the remixing of pages, enabling new interactions to emerge as the compositions are layered in different orders. Meanwhile, a sense of rhythm and conversation is introduced through the reciprocal turning of pages.
Call and Response iii
Twin prints from book pages
GWL Archives
Following lettering design work for a feature of Glasgow Women’s Library in GUM, (Glasgow University Magazine) which celebrated their physical archive collection, I translated these visuals into a physical form, returning full circle to the tactile objects and sorting methods I wanted to reference. Reading: ‘A Place of Joy’, a quote from the feature, the piece is contextualised as a site-specific typographic sculpture.
From Fabric to Paper
Building on research from my extended essay, this project explores the relationship between tatreez (Palestinian embroidery) and the paper diagrams that simultaneously preserve and obscure the craft.
Visually interpreting the words of Wafa Ghnaim, the outcome encourages the reader to search for fragments of anecdotes between grids, facilitating a tactile experience of learning and reflection which subverts the diagram’s typical role as a reductive, flattening format. I aim to illustrate tatreez as a living craft, directly entwined with the women who stitch it.
Play
Screenprinted posters and process extracts documenting an iterative journey of typographic play, all stemming from a found object (a stencil). Illustrating tangents and paths of curiousity/ interrogation. Each development can be placed on a spectrum of control to chaos- from tight, modular systems to generative, coded visuals- this challenges the usual use of a stencil to achieve regular reproduction.
