Marian Crawford

A blizzard 2021
letterpress and relief prints; unique state
Geelong Acquisitive Print Award (winner), 2023
© the artist

Artist statement:

A blizzard was inspired by lockdown studio experiments, where I made relief prints from found curtain fabrics, and discovered that printing transformed something mundane into an abstract pattern.

The five works with images and letterpress-printed text have been folded to both imitate the large pages of a broadsheet newspaper that are often folded to be read, and to fit my small press. My texts draw from Walter Benjamin’s descriptions of the public advertising, billboards, and typography, that newly surrounded him in the late 1920s, as ‘A blizzard of signs' (in One-Way Street, 1928).

A fifteen-fragment letterpress-printed phrase from Polish author Olga Tokarczuk’s 2009 novel Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead is also included in further reference to the power of newspapers to form opinion.

These fragments of text and image create my own early 2020s blizzard of signs for viewers to navigate.