Symposium: Letterpress as research method

The Nordic Letterpress Network (NLN) was established in 2021 with several aims to promote Letterpress (boktrykk/blysats) printing in the Nordic Countries.
The group made up of Angie Butler (UK), Marit Brandsnes (NO), Camilla Gunnar (FI), Edward Johansson (AX), Imi Maufe (NO), Carl Middleton (DK), and Lina Nordenström (SE) have met each year for a short residency at different letterpress museums or printshops. In 2025 we organised an exhibition at Grafiska Sällskapet Gallery in Stockholm showing Letterpress works by over 66 nordic artists. NLN is an open network for anyone to organise events and projects under the name.

Edwin Pickstone is a Lecturer, Researcher and Typography Technician in the Dept of Communication Design, Glasgow School of Art. Since 2006 he has been responsible for The Caseroom, GSA’s collection of Letterpress printing equipment. His practice-based research focuses on Letterpress and Relief Printing as tools for cross disciplinary collaboration and engagement with design history and visual culture.

Angie Butler is an artist-printer and practice-led researcher studying embodied research methodologies, Slow methods and practices of care within letterpress printing, stitch practices, artists’ books and small press publishing. Angie utilises the studio and the book as collaborative spaces, to connect people and language through shared haptic experiences.

Catherine Dixon PhD, is a designer and researcher. Her work is focused on the material practices of lettering including the teaching of typography and the value of letterpress in the education of the designer. She teaches on the Graphic Communication Design programme at Central Saint Martins (UAL) where she also supervises typographic research.

Claire Battershill is an Assistant Professor of modern book history and digital archives cross-appointed in the Faculty of Informatiom and the Department of English at the University of Toronto. She also holds the Wendy
Cecil Professorship in VicOne at Victoria College. Her monographs include Modernist Lives: Biography and Autobiography at Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press (Bloomsbury 2018) and Women and Letterpress Printing: Gendered Impressions (Cambridge UP 2022). She is a Co-Founder of the Modernist Archives Publishing Project (MAPP), a critical digital archive of early twentieth-century publishers’ records, and Co-Editor of The Edinburgh Companion to Women in Publishing (Edinburgh UP 2024).

Ola Kot is an artist specializing in typography, book design, and spatial forms. Her work investigates the relationship between typography, space, and sound, with a particular focus on its narrative role and its connection to movement. She approaches the written word as a catalyst for performative activities, expanding typography beyond static form. Using a range of methods and practices, including experimental approaches to letterpress, her research develops tools and strategies for interactive typographic installations, spanning from experimental books to large-scale spatial works.
A graduate of the Faculty of Graphic Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, where she earned her PhD and now serves as an adjunct professor, she has over a decade of teaching experience and leads studios in typography and graphic design. She has conducted workshops and collaborative projects internationally, presented her research at major conferences including twice at ATypI (2016, 2025) and collaborated with leading cultural institutions, integrating her artistic practice with curatorial and educational contexts.