Cherrell Avery – Acidulate

I mentioned on Friday that Cherrell Avery was one of the British calligraphers to have work selected for LAR.

Cherrell was a resident calligrapher at the V&A for six months. It is interesting how people develop from their experiences where everything somehow conspires to make a whole. Cherrell studied the letters, artefacts and artworks, did numerous drawings and sketches – the first etching happened in response to the Letter Exchange ’26 Words’ exhibition where her random word was ‘acidulate’.  The etching is done as a positive on copper, rather than a template for pulling prints and has been richly patinated with acrylics and an oxidising agent. I love the way the letters meander off the plate. I think it is this that makes the compostion of randomly dropped letters work so well.

Cherrell says: ‘This grew out of my experiences at V&A – looking at finely etched decoration on armour, and study in metal /silverware galleries, I was encouraged by the curator to use it for my calligraphy . I learnt the etching skills on silver, brass and copper (a course for jewellers) at West Dean college . You can read more about this on Cherrell’s blog!

Here are two other etched pieces. Time (a detail shown below) was heat treated.

This last project is very interesting. Children’s naive letterforms make wonderful artwork when treated seriously with adult materials (you’ve seen this theme of mine emerge every time I talk about child art). Cherrell did this as a  commisssion for a North London school where she gave a  workshop to enable children to design each square. The surfaces were then etched and patinated .

Congratulations Cherrell.