Lightboxes and Lettering

Yesterday, on a cold wet evening I went to the opening of a new exhibition at the Nunnery Gallery in Bow. Lightboxes and Lettering is the culmination of a project about the heritage of the printing industry in East London. Made possible by money raised by National Lottery players, the project focuses on the pre-digital era of printing in Hackney, Tower Hamlets and Waltham Forest and the experiences of people involved in the industry. The project explores how the printing industry has changed with the arrival of digital technologies, and how newer processes have transformed the everyday lives of print workers.

Printing – including lithography, silkscreen, and letterpress – has been an important industry in east London for many years. Access to small presses allowed political and community groups to easily print their books, pamphlets and leaflets, and many of these smaller firms were in east London. In recent years, the industry has changed a great deal, with the number of print workshops now much reduced and those in operation working in very different ways to how they would have done just a few decades ago.

The project maps former businesses, records the experiences of current and former employees, and shows collected printed matter, images of print workshops and details of technical processes.

This is a well researched exhibition and the project is documented in a catalogue (below) printed on Colorset, Shiro Echo and a map printed on our Offenbach Bible. It is printed by Aldgate Press, one of the East London printers featured in the exhibition and designed by Sandra Zellmer.  I'll write about the catalogue another time.

Congratulations to Lucy Harrison and Rosa Ainley from Rendezvous Projects who put the project and the exhibition together. The exhibition runs until 29th March and is at the Nunnery Gallery in Bow Road E3. It is an excellent exhibition and well worth a visit.

http://www.lightboxeslettering.com/
https://bowarts.org/nunnery

Posted by Justin Hobson 17.01.2020