Winner of 2019 Bright Lights Projection Commission Commemorating 150yrs of the Municipality of Wagga Wagga Wagga Wagga Art Centre, New South Wales, AUS. Viewable on the Art Centre as a 50mtr projection, March 2020+

The rural type exchange’ considers the contemporary use and applications of typography in our environment and the associated implications for society, culture and place. We are now situated in the third wave of typography’s development - with words now portable, often temporary; being feed to our social pages, digital interfaces and emails each day. Anybody can create content and exercise typographic decisions like font size, alignment and position. The ‘art’ of arranging letterforms in a message, an interface, or an advertisement is open to anyone who interacts with a device. Within this contemporary information exchange, type and image selections are made at the site of production which often determine how cultures, places and peoples are represented.

However, the evidence of typography representing cultures, places and peoples is historically less fleeting, and may be suggested through the physical manifestations of typefaces and type artefacts as seen on buildings, roads, in towns and throughout the regions we live. This project and the commission that stems from it, ‘Rural Type Exchange’, works with participants from Wagga Wagga as co-collaborators examining the town as a site of cultural production. This is then re-mixed and re-constructed from typographic evidence gleaned and assembled from physical signs, symbols and type artefacts found within city boundaries. Here, anywhere that type is found – on or in buildings, bridges, pavements, manholes, recreation reserves, letterboxes, signage, and print matter will be photographed, transferred and filmed and woven together to form a time-based artefact. The resulting artefact engages in and form a rich critique on the identity and site of Wagga Wagga, of industry and the towns history, its events, stories and of its residents.