starting from where

Dear Friend,

Please excuse me for taking so long with this letter. I have had much on my mind. It has been a while that I have been thinking about making work again. But. Starting from where? I am not at the same place as I was before. As if I were on the other side of a mountain. Here the flora is different and people speak another language. Most things that seemed important over there seem to have lost relevance here. On this side a stricter measure of authenticity applies. I need a working method that makes sense, a method of making sense of the world.

First I sat down to write. I could not think of doing anything but writing. Paragraphs of text appeared in front of the eyes of my mind, flowing out of my pen into my notebook, flowing on my computer screen or appearing on the paper from behind the noisy clamping of the old typewriter. Writing will be my stomach for emotions, digesting feelings into nutritious catharsis. Writing will be my gall bladder, dissecting the fat old canon so that my creative process can absorb it. Writing will be my liver, filtering the misery of a crumpled life and of a burning world into ideas that I can live with. Writing will let me venture into alternative realities.

Second I sat down to draw. Shapes appeared on the paper and invited other shapes to appear on other papers and ideas to manifest themselves through my pencil and brush and graphite and ink. I was reminded: drawing has always been my natural modus operandi. Once again it offered itself to become a cornerstone of an experiment. Drawing will be my creative limbs. It will be the feet that carry my design process. It will be the hands that connect me to the world, that collect, that understand by touching, that knead the clay of visual experience into a form.

Drawing will be my way of collecting and documenting. Before, I lived in an avalanche of images. I collected them in too many ways: by hand, by bad photographs, by internet searches, by photocopies, by screenshots, by fading memories, by unmanageable cloud storage spaces. I have been searching and scanning and filtering through and saving images. I have attempted to find interesting references, or fair research materials, or proofs for a concept.I have lived in a flux of images, because this is something that people these days regularly do, but I really looked at only a few images.

I would like to look at the images better. I would like to look at better images. I would like to make images matter. I will collect images by drawing them – letting them run through the filter of my eyes and mind and hands, observing them in detail and saving them in my notebooks. You may ask me: will it not take too much time to make all those drawings? Or you might be worried: will my drawings be accurate enough? Or in other words: will it not be a subjective documentation of the research finds? I have considered those questions already. I want my method to be slow, and I want it to be personal. I don’t only want to record what I can see, but I want to record what only I can see when I look better. Radically subjective, if you will, is how I will work drawing as a research method.

Third I sat down to draw-writing, or to write stories into drawn shapes: I sat down to design letters, alphabets, type. Type design will be my mind, feeding off the nutrients collected through writing, processing the impressions collected through drawing, synthesizing ideas and intuitions. I think about typography as the bridge between the visual and the textual. Through this bridge I seek to let the two realms get inextricably entangled with each other. Typefaces are used to tell stories. Stories need typefaces to be told. But typefaces can also tell stories. Which stories? And by which means? Those are the questions that my work seeks to answer.

I hope to show-and-tell you more soon.

Kind regards,

– Nóra