COUNTER collection: COUNTER/JULIE medium lined fabric journal

About the COUNTER collection:

The collection COUNTER celebrates the space in and around letter forms: open or closed, narrow or wide. In typography, a counter is the actual area of a letter entirely or partially enclosed by a letterform or symbol. Imagine the ‘hole’ in the middle of a beautiful O or the half-circle area at the top of a lowercase e. What is that area, other than a necessary part of the whole; not empty or negative, but blank and full of possibility?

The collection of letterpress prints that began the idea for COUNTER was made during a two-week residency at the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum in 2024. Hamilton houses 1.5 million pieces of wood type and is the only museum dedicated to the preservation, study, production, and printing of wood type. At Hamilton, I concentrated on printing some of the larger, billboard-sized wooden letterforms in the collection (some more than 3 feet tall). It was such a dream to have the time and opportunity to print with their historic type collection to make art that celebrates the beauty of this strange, wonderful grouping of shapes we call an alphabet. COUNTER follows in the footsteps of my past collections GLYPHS, ROOT, and RAVEL, which experiment and examine aspects of the written word.