Ane Thon Knutsen: The Mark on the Wall

Ane Thon Knutsen is an artist and graphic designer living and working in Oslo. She was educated with a BA (2010), MA (2012) and PhD (2019) in Graphic Design from The Oslo National Academy of The Arts. For the last ten years, Ane has worked as a freelance graphic designer, lecturer, and artist. She has also been part of establishing Fellesverkstedet, a production facility for art and design, ranging from screen print, to woodworking, laser engraving, and CNC-milling.

Always jumping back and forth between graphic design and arts, Ane first developed an interest in letterpress printing as a student in 2008, thanks to her professor Maziar Raein. Ane explains; “At the time, no one in Norway was into letterpress, and I was mostly advised against spending time on it. Except for Maziar, who gave me a key to the shop, and I spent a lot of days and nights down there, teaching myself letterpress“. Over the years, the art of letterpress became ever more consuming of her time, and on the day that her Mac crashed in 2011, a printer in Oslo phoned her up and asked Ane to take their letterpress equipment off their hands; “…and I decided that this is what I am supposed to do! To take responsibility and prove my opponents wrong in showing the educational and creative power of moveable type“.

Ane’s basement studio is fitted out with a collection of equipment that she has saved from junkyards. “I have done extensive research on Norwegian letterpress and spent much time with the last generation from the industry to learn typesetting properly” describes the letterpress artist. However, as an outsider from the other side of the digital revolution, Ane also had a special interest in authors who printed their own work and ran private presses in order to have full creative power, such as Virgina Woolf, Nancy Cunard, and Anais Nin.

For many years, Ane’s process was very technically oriented. She printed and laser cut in almost every material imaginable in order to develop an extensive material knowledge. Ane completed an MA on Tactility in Printed Matter, analysing how mixing analogue and digital tools and techniques could offer new contemporary ways of using letterpress. With this foundation, her process changed during her time as a PhD candidate, and for the last few years she has mostly started projects by writing and doing research on the subject at hand so that she can develop interesting research questions.

“It never takes long before I’m at it in the workshop. I work in an iterative way, and try to trust the process and believe development of the project happens through trial, error, and good old hard work. My processes often tend to be physically straining. I like to test my endurance and limits, to see what happens to my work and to test and develop my skills. It’s really a love/hate relationship.”

Ane’s inspiration is often drawn from literature, since childhood she has longed for the impossible of bridging the gap between reality and literature. She also finds inspiration in good conversations, daydreaming, art, collaborations, critique, and work itself. Recently, the printmaker has been working on artistic research and self initiated art projects. During her PhD, she created a selection of different graphic adaptions of The Mark on the Wall, the first short story Virginia Woolf wrote while she taught herself to typeset. “I have worked on the assumption that the typesetting has influenced the story, and that becoming a printer was the huge turning point in here authorship, where she became free to write what she liked, free from editors holding her down” explains Ane. The Mark on the Wall aims to communicate to people with no knowledge of typesetting, “the feeling of being absorbed in building each and every word, letter by letter with your own hands“. The commitment and time consuming work of a typesetter is illustrated in the project by fragmenting the story and breaking it up into a couple of words on 1,837 A3 prints. Ane spent three months alone in her studio in a printing frenzy, reprinting the whole story. Ane’s The Mark on the Wall was incredibly mathematical, and was made as a site specific piece for a room measuring 30x8x4 meters. She CNC-milled out a set of type in 168 points, which specially fitted the size of the room in relation to the length of the story, and the format of her Triumph proofing press. After the prints were taken down, Ane sent them to book binder, Johan Solberg. The project is now in its fifth edition, and Ane is currently on the hunt to find a very big gallery to present another edition.

Still researching Virginia Woolf ́s work as a typesetter, Ane plans to keep analysing literature and the outsiders of history through letterpress, with the hope to present a more diverse history of print, through working on the material of a book, and the power and shape of words. She is also conducting a reflective project about Norwegian typographic terminology where she invites a wide range of Norwegian designers to participate. Ane is excited to continue practising CNC- milling, and experiment with a new set of type drawn by her colleague Ellmer Stefan.

www.anethonknutsen.com
@anethonknutsen

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