James Cook, typewriter artist from London, UK. Photography © J. Cook
1.Tell us what you do and your beginnings.
I am a 23-year-old London-based typewriter artist. I consider typewriter art, colloquially known as a “typicition”, a part-time job with architectural design as the focal point of my career goals. My subject matter delves into architecture, landscape and portraiture (both human and animal).
I have been producing my “typicitions” for over 6 years and the scale of my work ranges from the size of a postcard and the antithesis of this being rolls-upon-rolls of paper. Specifically, these are drawings constructed in section and hot-pressed together thereby allowing for creations larger than the limitations of a typewriter’s traditional paper-feed.
Subsequently, each drawing can take anywhere between a week and a month to complete and yet somehow I have managed to accumulate a portfolio of almost 100 pieces of work since my amateurish beginnings back in 2014. Each drawing is assembled from a variety of characters, letters and punctuation marks using the forty-four keys of a typical typewriter. Information is overlaid and the keys are tapped at variable pressures to achieve tonal shading.
