Featured marketplace researcher: Pauline Clancy

Here is a snapshot of work by Pauline Clancy, one of the researchers exhibiting in the ‘Beyond Pattern and Chaos’ symposium marketplace on Wednesday 5^th September 2018.

Pauline Clancy: Statement

Typography, the visual representation of language, exists to communicate meaning through written, printed or digital forms. In this study, positioned at the intersection of art and design practice, the inter-relationship between typography and communication is interrogated through typographic abstraction. Letterforms and glyphs are deconstructed and framed in alternative ways challenging and pushing beyond conventional legibility and functionality in typographic form. This study encompasses a hybrid method where my design approach and tacit knowledge gained through practice as a graphic designer is merged with a fine art approach to making through the process of screenprinting.

Screenprinting is employed as a main method of making enabling a responsive and reflective approach, exploring typography as an expanded practice. Through the process, these typographic investigations embrace chance collision and hybridity creating new abstract forms and patterns formulating in a series of serigraphs. This includes the breaking down of letterforms into fragmented units while highlighting the materiality of the process and the physicality of letterforms, where they are transformed into images, exposing and emphasising the graphic forms. Synthesising practice with theories of semiotics and perception, this cross disciplinary study examines how typographic abstraction can re-configure meaning of typographic form and offer alternative readings [re-considerations] in the visual presentation of language.

Pauline Clancy Research Biography

Pauline Clancy is a lecturer and PhD researcher at Ulster University, Belfast, Northern Ireland. Her typographic practice explores the relationship between typography and language and typography and place primarily through the screenprinting process. While finished artefacts are important, the experimental/making process is of equal importance, where the process also becomes the outcome. Current PhD research is exploring experimental typography / typography as an expanded practice at the intersection of art and design.

Recent exhibition of work includes Typographic DNA of Place Accademia Belle Arti, Perugia, Italy. (Sept–Oct 2017). This was a joint exhibition with Richard McElveen, Senior Lecturer Visual Communications, IADT, Dun Laoghaire, Dublin. Recent Group Exhibitions include: International Print Exhibition Atelier Empreinte Luxembourg (2018) 40³ Crescent Arts Centre, Belfast (2017) A for Aber 2, The School of Art, Aberystwyth University, Wales (2017) The Art of Making, Fenderesky Gallery, Belfast (2017) New Impressions, Wisconsin, USA (2017). International Mini Print Biennial, Seacourt Print Workshop, Bangor and FE Mc William Gallery, Down (2016). International Artist’s Book Triennial, Lithuania, Leipzig Book Fair, Germany and The Cole Art Centre, Texas (2015/16). Work is also held in special collections and archives including Manchester Metropolitan University Special Collections of Artists Books and in the permanent collection of Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum, Wisconsin, USA.