I have done printmaking before, so I decided to take it up a notch and make a digital text of the process while I was at it. I just got a top-down phone mount for work and wanted to test it out, so I made a stop-motion.

Juggling the two processes (making the potato prints and capturing them) created some interesting challenges; I was so focused on the incremental motions that I forgot the bigger printing-technique guiding them. For instance, I forgot to reverse my letters in the “first edition” so that they would not be backward in the print. At least we got a valuable learning opportunity out of it! Since I was making a stop motion, the stamps took me longer than necessary to make. However, I would estimate that without pausing to take a photo every few seconds, it would have taken about one minute from start to finish for each letter. In other words, one print would take as long as watching my video five times.

There were other challenges directly related to potato-printing itself. First, the starch in the potatoes kept clogging up my pens. This meant that my letter-drafting process eventually resulted in me carving into the potato slices with a ballpoint. Second, it was difficult to carve clean, rounded edges (the C). Lastly, perfect replication is was neigh impossible for me to achieve with my potato and the thick acrylic paint I was using. I noticed between the first and second prints that the paint had worked its way INTO the potato. When I pressed the slices down, they slid and blurred the edges. I also lost the fine-details of the potato flesh.

I was very mindful of the word I chose to print, “TEACH”.  I made a list of 5-letter words beforehand, which also included:

• Earth
• Lysol
• Finch
• BIRDS
• HOUSE

I chose “TEACH” because it seemed the most likely to succeed. The letters are very angular, so they would be much easier to cut (unlike the curving letters in the other words). The only interior space I would need to remove was the triangle from inside the A, which would also be much easier than removing a circle from an O. I suspected I might forget to draft my letters mirrored while shooting, so my last criterion was that I needed a word where all of the letters were either vertically symmetrical or could be flipped.

My curiosity for how text evolved started with picture books of cave drawings and hieroglyphics and listening to my Grandfather’s stories of his career as a Stereotyper for Pacific Press (which printed The Sun and The Province). He used to tell me about what work was like for the printing company, from the process of making the plates by carefully aligning all of the type in columns, molding it in paper mache, and delivering it to the foundry room where it was cast in molten metal to form the plate itself. The plate was then taken to the printers. All of that, to make one page for the newspaper.

(He was also very involved with the union, and later in his career he did photography and graphic design for the newspapers).

During my undergrad, I took a course called “Invention of the Book” which lead up to the printing press. I got to experience writing on wax tablets, papyrus, and vellum (lambskin). I even attempted to make my own rag-paper… a rather hindered process since I was living in Residence at the time, and could not ferment the rags into a paste. In the end, I managed to create my paper by collecting and processing lint from my building’s laundry room! Looking back across the determination and ingenuity of humanity to leave behind their words is awe-inspiring. As my fingers fly across my keyboard and the words appear on the screen, I can’t help but think back on how it felt to scrape a quill on vellum. Of the fight just to get my initials, LU, written. Of all of the moving pieces, materials, and specialists needed to print the newspaper. Of the time I made an illustrated copy of Christina Rossetti’s The Goblin Market, from binding the book to scribing the words (twice! First in pencil than again in pen).  I am very thankful to be living in a digital age!