Working against Type

Saul Pankhurst’s Touch Type is less a project than a programme: the kind of career commitment that spans years, sprawls contexts and unfurls across chance encounters. This is an example of the work finding the artist rather than vice versa: a fixation that demands a never-not-on outlook, an everything-is-connected approach. Touch Type is the work of a gifted, thoughtful artist finely attuned to whatever might constitute ‘the human’. One day it might actually be finished.

Supported by a research-led residency with Connecting Threads in 2023, which has allowed the artist to home in on his themes and accelerate some of his thinking around them, Touch Type will – eventually – exist in the form of 26 moving-image chapters. Together and individually, these chart – in simultaneously broad and peculiarly personal ways – our transition from tangible to digital interactions with language, each other and the wider world. Pankhurst is collaborating with various subjects across the UK to showcase an array of intergenerational perspectives, including those of people living with single and dual sensory loss.

Touch Type began half a decade ago, when Pankhurst visited Glasgow Press, champions of a form of relief printing known as letterpress, whose western origins date back to the mid-fifteenth century. Defined by its technical process, through which a continuous roll of stock is repeatedly pressed onto a bed of raised, inked blocks of type, letterpress printing was the predominant mass production technique for text-based publications until midway through the twentieth century.

It isn’t surprising that the characteristics of letterpress, its iconographies, were irresistible to Pankhurst. The artist’s recent films have included Unknown Hand (2021), a short docu-portrait of an individual coming to terms with the irrevocable changes in his life caused by a degenerative illness, and To Do (2022), an even shorter and more intense reflection on the distractions, digital and otherwise, that might compete for one’s attention during an abortive attempt at a screen-bound mindfulness exercise. It’s no pun to note that considerations of letterpress printing left their mark on Pankhurst: he began to think of the industry, and its disappearance, as a metaphor through which to explore the wider meaning and perhaps deeper processes of loss – in the technological sense, yes, but also culturally, socially and physically.

Touch Type is a series of moving-image vignettes, viewable in stand-alone terms while complementing one another with varying degrees of subtlety. They may at some point form a single feature-length film, to be experienced as an uninterrupted whole. The project takes the form of the abecedarium: an alphabetised sequence in which eponymous letters – A, B, C and so on – provide a quietly declarative sub-theme or interest. In the chapters made available so far, Kk denotes ‘Key’, Oo becomes ‘Out of Order’, Pp means ‘Pendulum’, while Tt is ‘Truth’ and Vv stands for ‘Voice’.

In the first of these, audio testimony claims – over images of antique globes, a heavy-duty bookcase – that, “I think one role of an archivist is to try and maintain, as far as possible, the original order of creation”. That crucial subclause, as far as possible, encapsulates the broader themes at play. Viewed in sequence, Pankhurst’s entries begin, in teasing and tantalising ways, to poke at the limitations of human perception, of knowledge in a world that’s making it increasingly difficult to verify and falsify assumptions of truth.

On the one hand, Touch Type’s structuring device suggests a rigid linearity, an educational framework whose start and end are naturally predetermined (the subheading of each short is numeric, denoting which chapter of the 26 we’re watching). On the other hand, the possibilities are nigh-on limitless, like the arterial routes that bleed off the pages of a saddle-stitched A-to-Z roadmap of yore. There is nothing here, in other words, that is natural: Touch Type asserts and insists on its linguistic starting points only to draw attention to the arbitrariness of language itself. Pp, for ‘Pendulum’, an exploration of the relationship between technology and time, could just as easily have been titled Ss, for ‘Spider’, after its image of an industrious arachnid manually spinning – to its own unhurried pace – a web.

In this sense, Touch Type’s ostensibly encyclopaedic remit plays out like one of filmmaker Peter Greenaway’s old gags. In the early shorts of the British avant-garde’s great self-mythologiser, there is a fascination not merely with the indexical capabilities of photographic film, but with indexing per se, and with indices as databanks, lines of inquiry, modes of production. There are H is for House (1973), Dear Phone (1976) and A Walk Through H (1978), and then there is The Falls (1980), his three-hour tribute to fictional entries of a phone directory, whose surnames all begin with FALL. Greenaway once claimed to have made the latter in giddy response to critics who’d suggested his previous shorts were as dull as reading the telephone book.

This is not to suggest the vignettes that comprise Touch Type are merely formal queries. An equally insistent ethical consideration is threaded through Pankhurst’s work, as if he’s acutely and even painfully aware of something with which Greenaway would never have troubled himself: his own position as a filmmaker in relation to real-life subjects. To acknowledge and address the power imbalance intrinsic to documentary making, Pankhurst grounds his research in collaborations rather than transactions, to reciprocation rather than extraction. There’s certainly a warmth to these films, an inviting and palpable sense of conversation and care. Play, too: the films often reveal or bear the markings of their own construction – whether by visual sleights of hand, the editorial intervention of intertitles, or the inevitable blemishes and grain intrinsic to 16mm film.

Pankhurst’s is an iterative process made possible through trust and chemistry, human connections formed over time. As an artistic method, it resists the commercial compulsions of the marketplace, demanding as it does a longevity that isn’t easily accommodated by, say, a single artist residency, research grant or project funding that needs to be spent by next quarter. Pankhurst’s images are, then, actively made, authored, in dialogue with subjects who contribute their own biases and perspectives. To this extent, collaboration also enables the artist to lean fruitfully into ambivalence. The film’s polyvocal method allows for an aggregate picture, a gestalt whose constituent parts meanwhile are by turns charming, funny, poignant, captivating – but never reducible to a single interpretation.

Pankhurst’s approach compels him to think through certain aesthetic and conceptual challenges, exemplified in Oo and Tt, which share the same subject-protagonist, a blind student. In the first of these films, the narrator defines words and concepts he has made up: a language system that enhances his (and perhaps our) comprehension and navigation of the world. In the second, he talks of the difference between objective and subjective reality over images of a 3D-printed ball produced to bridge a conceptual gap for blind people who have never seen, for instance, the moon. While Pankhurst’s own imagery homes in on certain details, his broader image-making endeavour, the rich black-and-white textures he achieves, might be complicated by the notion that his collaborator has no experience of visual contrast.

Additionally, Touch Type lovingly approximates, through its own distinctly cinematic techniques, the craftsmanship required of letterpress – an industry having to survive at a reduced scale, as an artisanal craft, a niche offering that immediately announces itself, in ways that are simultaneously tangible but hard to define, as endearingly vintage. Letterpress, like analogue film, is simultaneously machinic and manned, manual and mechanic: tactile. Pankhurst’s images here are innately personal in the way their contours, their light, appear to have been actively carved out from what would otherwise be shadow.

It is to this end that his 2023 residency with Connecting Threads has been so beneficial to the project at large: it was during this particular research- and process-led stint that the artist began to experiment technically, playing on the parallels between letterpress and the tools of early cinema – by focusing, for example, on animating, etching and printing directly onto film stocks using letterpress; or by filming through typographic stencils as a masking technique, deepening his understanding of the relationship between these specifically analogue forms of making an image.

The iterative, frame-by-frame nature of photochemical film also mirrors the mechanical repetition of letterpress. On film, sameness – as in a sustained image – is experienced durationally, with each imperceptibly unique frame of film appearing, when projected, unchanged. To repeat or reconsume an image, knowingly or not, is to experience it anew: even the anticipation of what is to come second time around irrevocably changes and informs the mode of spectatorship. Likewise, you cannot read the same book twice: the second time is different by virtue of it not being the first. This is true not only in the sense that a second read is undertaken in what are ineluctably different mental and material circumstances, but also in the sense that two copies of a letterpress-printed book produced as part of the same, ostensibly identical run will have required different points of a paper roll to be lowered onto a bed of type at fundamentally different points in time.

While such philosophising might appear or sound arch, the recurrent strength of Touch Type is its ability to ask questions and to poke at these notions without ever appearing superior to the historical or political moment that underpins them. Promoting partial, incomplete, ground-level perspectives, Pankhurst’s films key in on crucial questions around truth and the epistemological frameworks by which we know the world, in the face of their slow disappearance, in ways that feel generative rather than didactic. Again, the apparent closed circuitry of the alphabet is revealed to be an open-ended gesture, a construct of immense generosity.

The first word of Touch Type’s title, in this context, becomes an invitation, a dare: less adjective than verb. I touch, therefore I am. If the broader work is never finished – and it might never be – it would take nothing away from those parts, and the truths and insights contained within them, that are already out in the world.

As the narrator of ingenious entry Tt asserts: “If all the sentient life on the planet died out, I think the planet would still be there. But you can’t really prove it.” There is a quiet optimism to be found and felt in a line like this: in a looking-glass world in which prevailing powers are upturning and weaponising truth, perpetuating a kind of wilfully ignorant knowledge system to deepen the inequities and processes of marginalisation on which capital depends, Touch Type invests in tactility as a final bastion of connection, understanding, decency: the tactility of an industrial process, an artistic practice, a workplace solidarity lived out in-person.

For six weeks in 2023, Saul Pankhurst was Connecting Threads artist in residence at Robert Smail’s Printing Works in Innerleithen. Dating back to 1866, and today managed by National Trust for Scotland, Robert Smail's is an operational letterpress printers and an important part of Scotland’s industrial heritage.

Saul Pankhurst is showing work at the Scottish Poetry Library, Edinburgh from 27th May to 16th June 2025.

Michael Pattison is a critic from Gateshead. He has a PhD in film practice from Newcastle University, and lives in the Scottish Borders town of Hawick, where he is a Director of Alchemy Film & Arts.