3 minute read
press on
Triangulation by Casmic Lab / casmiclab.com
eOne thing always leads to another. For Chris Sleath, it all begin with a dream to restore vintage bikes. He began working on classic racing machines from the 1950s and 60s, and needed a way to fund the habit.
Why not create bicycle-related prints, and sell them?, he thought. Although lacking any formal training, he’d always had an interest in design and illustration, so he did a short, self-initiated printmaking course, then began helping out at a printmaker’s. Then, as these things do, the bicycle art began to take over from the bikes themselves. Soon, Chris found that he’d founded Dynamoworks, and was busy producing limited edition typographic screenprint and letterpress posters, all with a cycling theme.
Boneshaker first met Chris at the inaugural Bespoked Bristol Handmade Bicycle Show, back in 2011. We shared a stall, several beers and even more stories with him over that sun-bleached weekend. Talking to him brings the world of printmaking alive, and reveals parallels between it and the world of cycling. “There’s an immediacy, a direct contact between me and the created thing,” he says. He tries wherever possible to work without involving computers, so that “the process is not filtered through a screen, in the same way that travelling by bicycle puts you immediately in touch with the world around you, instead of filtering it through glass. It’s about that heightened awareness, being in the environment, feeling, seeing, smelling, hearing – all those things that are going on when you’re on a bike.” e In a past life he’d worked as a scene painter and set carpenter, so the old wooden blocks of letterpress had an immediate appeal. “When you pick up a piece of type, it’s a bit like being a kid again, they’re like the old-fashioned wooden play blocks”, he says. Chris rides in every day along the river to work as a technician at Edinburgh Printmakers, the oldest, biggest open-access print studio in the UK. “It’s a wonderful place,” he says, “a place where anyone can come in and have a go at lots of different kinds of printing.” When he can, he heads
out of the city, up the Tweed Valley to Robert Smail’s Printworks, an atmospheric, National Trust-owned working museum in the Scottish Borders. “I’m very lucky to be able to use it, this amazing old place, full of history, with huge mountains just outside the window. The oldest continually inhabited house in Scotland is just around the corner. It’s all very beautiful.” The printworks was bequeathed to the Trust in the 1980s, but is still set up as it was in the 1940s, when every town used to have a small jobbing printworks, much as many towns used to have their own bike builder. Things changed dramatically in the 1960s, when cheaper,
quicker offset litho printing became the industry standard – and letterpresses were scrapped in their thousands. “They were pushing them out of the windows, selling them for scrap, leaving them to rust in car parks.” Now, much as there is a resurgence in handmade bicycles, there’s a small fire burning anew for traditional printing processes like letterpress. James Lucas, Boneshaker’s beardy founding editor, has also helped establish the Letterpress Collective, another open workshop in Bristol aimed at ‘bringing slumbering presses back to life’. Part of the attraction was a form of creativity that is tactile, rhythmic, immediate. People are always asking Chris “why don’t you do it all digitally?” His answer is simple. “I’m not interested in looking at a computer. I like being hands-on. I like getting dirty. I like doing it this way. It’s a labour of love. Same as I could get the bus to work – but I like riding my bike in instead.” e The prints are designed around memorable cycling quotes. “I’ve read a lot of books about cycling and quite a few of them just jumped out of the page,” he says, despite the fact that “cyclists aren’t particularly well-known for saying insightful or inspiring things because they’re usually interviewed after they’ve just
