Sophie Davis

Writer


Collating language: typographic fragments and Ella Sutherland’s Carte Blanche



March 2019

 1. How a siren is a voice

In 2011 the artist and designer Paul Elliman visited the Ilam School of Fine Arts, where I was a student in the graphic design department. He gave a brief presentation on his recent work, which at the time was exploring the historical use of emergency vehicle sirens and noise in urban and cultural life.1 Years later, I can’t recall the spoken part of the presentation, but I do remember the collective experience of listening to Elliman’s audio samples. The lights were dimmed and we were all crammed together on vinyl seats as soundwaves tracked across a laptop screen and the weird wailing of different emergency vehicles filled the room. Each had a slightly different pitch, speed and tone, as well as accompanying noises of the cities they were recorded in. 

As a listener, this prompted me to delve a little deeper into the experiences of watching news broadcasts, travelling abroad or watching TV, and to register the different inflections of local sirens with some novelty. Elliman’s clips highlighted a complex form of nonverbal communication. Sirens—like the particular graphics, makes and models of the vehicles that emit them—become part of the recognisable voice and identity of local law, order and the State. They can be written off as background noise, provoke intimidation and panic, or perhaps provide reassurance depending on who is listening and in what context. Elliman has written that an interest in typography “finds its focus in groups of letters that echo the collective form of society”,2 and in a similar way, the reverberations of sirens are social and political.


2. Fitting in

As the shape of this “collective form”, the history of modern western typography is paralleled by an ongoing push to standardise and mechanise communication. The idea that the perfect typeface should transmit information in the most efficient, legible or “universal” way possible persists across a variety of contexts. Moreover, typographic systems that enable the technological dissemination of language reflect and maintain power dynamics through standardisation. These systems can other that which they don’t accommodate or anticipate.

In 2017, when Stuff.co.nz began using tohutō (macrons) in te reo Māori words, none of its chosen typefaces had these built-in to their selection of characters. As a result, each ā, ē, ī, ō and ū defaulted to a slightly different size and totally different typeface, disrupting the lines of text on the site. The effect has now been remedied by Stuff, but it is reasonably common across numerous websites and printed materials that utilise a limited anglophile character set. This isn’t just limited to the design of typefaces but also design software, which mediates typography and instils further defaults to language. 


3. Ruptures, urgency and improvisation

Hand-made signs continue to have an immediacy and impact that is deeply intertwined with contemporary ideas of protest, emergency or revolution. While 21st-century activism plays out across a variety of digital platforms, people continue to make use of what is at hand when responding to an urgent need to take action—a scrappy piece of found cardboard, a marker pen or can of paint from the corner store, etc. There’s also something enduring about the gesture of handwriting a message compared with a printed sign. It’s not only an established or convenient form, but one that is linked to an embodied collective action and generates meaning.

This kind of improvised communication also reminds me of living in Ōtautahi Christchurch post 2011, where handwritten signs became a part of the new post-quake landscape of the city. Spray-painted onto buildings, attached to temporary fencing and barriers, or made with scavenged building materials, they communicated practical information as well as simmering anger at CCC, CERA and government representatives. Some stayed in place for years while the usual systems of the built environment remained ruptured. 

The print and typography theorist and artist Johanna Drucker has examined the multiplicity of ways in which typography is a product of, and is densely coded with, cultural contexts. In her book What is? she explores a definition for the humble letter—whether hastily handwritten, carefully designed, mechanically or digitally reproduced—approaching this as an epistemological question:

  •                 ...importantly, the question “what is a letter? isn’t answered just by a history of material forms and styles, or production modes. We have to address a second, equally significant question: what is the concept of a letter at any given moment? What does it mean to ask what the “concept” of a letter is? Very simply, it means that acknowledging a letter, like any other cultural artefact, is designed according to the parameters on which it can be conceived.3

In certain cases where handwritten signage has been used, the parameters could be understood as quite literally giving form to individual voices—even if to communicate a collective message—and to demonstrate a disturbance in the social fabric and standard communication systems. 


4. Low-res and high-vis

As someone working from the hybrid position of artist and designer, Ella Sutherland utilises printed matter, text and publishing, as well as digital and physical archives to explore visual languages of communication. She approaches typography as a system of power relations, a form of social documentary and as a way of finding humour and pushing back against the grain. Her practice develops and continually rewrites its own eclectic and playful typographic logic. 

Ella has approached a wide variety of subject matter with what could be described as a “typographic attitude”. Her interest in the tensions between the margins and mainstream is present as she works across diverse visual vocabularies. For her exhibition Boring month, start to finish, the whole month (2015) at North Projects, Ōtautahi, Ella developed a series of black-and-white posters that took newspaper crossword puzzles as their starting point. Working at the time as a graphic designer for a tertiary marketing department, she covertly collected puzzle pages from her workplace break room. She reproduced aspects of their design components and added larger-than-life disembodied silhouettes of her own teeth, as if they were about to chomp through pages of newsprint. The resulting works humorously played with unspoken rules and social codes: how to behave at work, how to approach a puzzle, what purpose design serves and how straight our communication or incisors should be. Goofy as they were, the posters also hinted at difference and discomfort in the established languages of creative production. 

This language is addressed more directly and with characteristic humour in the recent poster 25 bros in a row (2018), produced for the platform Designers Speak (Up).4 In this work, two columns of text collate lines taken verbatim from the bios of male Designer’s Institute of New Zealand Best Award winners. The collected samples range from the entirely glib to the ludicrous, including excerpts such as “he is a brand visionary...he has worked on the All Blacks Silver Fern Logo....he is world class and a true champion...he is on the board of directors of…he settled in New Zealand after a long Yacht voyage with his family...he managed the unlikely achievement of making women in cardies look sexy”, etc. Together, this absurd roll call of achievements highlights a New Zealand vernacular of masculine success and longstanding hegemony within creative practice.

Giving visibility to a language developed within an entirely different context, Ella’s exhibition Margins and Satellites at Enjoy Public Art Gallery, Te Whanganui-a-tara Wellington (2018), explored a “queering of mechanical reproduction”.5 This body of work responded to lesbian and feminist print publications of the 1970s to 1990s, held in the Lesbian and Gay Archives of New Zealand (LAGANZ). The silkscreen print After Lesbian Feminist Circle, 2018, collated C’s from a magazine masthead over its lifespan, creating a micro-typographic documentary that questioned what one letter could potentially embody. It was installed as part of a larger series that formed an unconventional timeline of printed matter. The passing decades were marked by cartoon illustrations of New Zealand prime ministers’ eyes, starting with Norman Kirk and ending with Jacinda Ardern. Staring out from the white gallery walls, the eyes looked in different directions, watching—or perhaps glancing away from—the communities who produced this visual language.

The exhibition Carte Blanche presented at SoFA Ilam Campus Gallery continues this interrogation of visual languages and the politics of visibility. It began development while the artist was in Paris for the first twelve weeks of the gilets jaunes (Yellow Vests) anti-government protests in November 2018. These protests initially stemmed from a sharp increase in diesel taxes imposed by the French government, affecting working-class industries and further contributing to a rising cost of living under the economic policies of President Emmanuel Macron. While the impact of these policies was particularly acute for those living within less-populated areas of France who were reliant on cars for transport, the movement included working-and-middle-class people of different ages and regions who wore the yellow high-vis vests that must be carried in every French vehicle by law.6 The vests became a highly effective symbol of protest due to their ubiquity, visibility and association with working-class industries, and were customised with handwritten messages.

This moment of protest might initially seem like an unlikely context for a Sydney-based New Zealander to take as a starting point for an exhibition in Ōtautahi, until we consider Ella’s previous work. Here, a language is drawn out from these events and the highly saturated visual identity of France itself, asking the audience to find meaning and interpret this within another context. This body of work sharply plays between the detritus and improvisations of this moment in France’s history, the country’s history of social and political upheaval and revolution, and the most culturally prestigious aspects of Parisian identity. This includes hand-drawn messages directly taken from the hi-vis vests worn by protestors, medieval manuscript initials and references to the makeshift hoardings put across store windows in Paris to protect businesses from vandalism during demonstrations. 

Ella described this work to me as an attempt to “call forth the visible”,7 perhaps in a similar way to her previous projects. Her use of medieval typography makes direct reference to France’s historic “high-culture” power and brings this into conversation with the embodied action of gilets jaunes protestors handwriting onto their fabric vests. The exhibition includes samples of calligraphic lettering taken from medieval manuscripts and inhabited initials, enlarged decorative letters used in manuscripts to signal the beginning of a word, chapter, or paragraph. These were sometimes hand-coloured with gold and silver to produce illuminated characters. By examining this visual language, Carte Blanche doesn’t simply emphasise strategies used to enliven medieval text. It highlights what is often considered as the most treasured and culturally significant samples of written text in Europe, putting this into conversation with wearable contemporary protest messages that act as high-vis emergency beacons. These signals collectively illuminate a much larger political and social context while giving agency to individual embodied actions and voices. 

Here, language is collated from a variety of sources to interrogate what it means to shape a collective form and make it visible. Developed from an ongoing trajectory of questioning, the exhibition brings together voices of order and control in the urban environment, of power in typographic systems, and of dissent, revolution, ruptures and identity. Together, these social and political reverberations interrogate what a visual language is and can be.




  1. This research has resulted in projects and performances at the ICA London and PERFORMA, New York. See https://frieze.com/article/taken-wonders, accessed 8 March 2019.
  2. Paul Elliman, “The World as a Printing Surface”, in Karel Martens: Counterprint, ed. Carel Kuitenbrouwer, Paul Elliman and Karel Martens (London: Hyphen Press, 2004), unpaginated.
  3. Johanna Drucker, What is? Nine epistemological essays (Victoria, TX: Cuneiform Press, 2013), 9.
  4. Designers Speak (Up) is a platform formed in 2018 by designer Catherine Griffiths in response to the long-standing inadequate representation of women in major awards given by the Designer’s Institute of New Zealand. Accessed 5 March 2019.
  5. See http://enjoy.org.nz/margins-satellites, accessed 8 March 2019
  6. “France Fuel Protests: Who are the jilets jaunes (Yellow Vests?)”, BBC News, 6 December 2018, accessed 11 March 2019.  
  7. Conversation with the artist, 10 March 2019.



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