Common Craft was a reciprocal mail-art research and teaching project run in 2018 between staff and students of the Art and Craft Department, Oslo National Academy of Arts and Illustration specialism, Glasgow School of Art. The aim was to examine local and disciplinary practices of drawing and print in separate locations—and how they might usefully collide within the work of students reviewing their practice as they began their professional lives as practitioners. Over the course of the year parcels were sent via air mail between the institutions initiating a call and response series of artworks. In addition to staff exchange between the institutions we also ran a joint intense workshop in Glasgow mid-way through, when the students met each other for the first time, collaborated in drawing outputs and in curating a work-in-progress show. From simple starting conditions, this project generated exceptionally complex and thought-provoking debates and outcomes for both staff and students involved. Examining the works produced, alongside the suitability of print and drawing as mediums for material exchange, this talk will address the themes of translation and disjunctions of distance raised by the act of repeatedly attempting to send parcels of art, via mail, from one institution to another. We were inspired in part by translation theorist Lawrence Venuti’s aim of preserving difference, strangeness and ‘otherness’ when communicating across languages and cultures (Venuti 1995: 303).

Dr. Frances Robertson is a Lecturer in Design: History & Theory and Reader in Material Cultures of Drawing at Glasgow School of Art. Her cross-disciplinary research embraces art and design theory and history, visual culture, cultural history, and histories of science and technology, examining drawing as practice and discourse. Recent publications include Print Culture: Technologies of the Printed Page from Steam Press to eBook (Routledge, 2013), ‘Power in the Landscape: Regenerating the Scottish Highlands after WWII’ in Kjetil Fallan, ed. The Culture of Nature in the History of Design (Routledge forthcoming); ‘Chapter 13: Photography and illustration’ in Martin Conboy and Adrian Bingham, eds The Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press Volume 3: Power, Popularization and Permeation, 1900-2017 (Edinburgh UP –forthcoming); “Mere Adventurers in Drawing: Engineers and Draughtsmen as Visual Technicians in Nineteenth-Century Britain” (in Art versus Industry?: New Perspectives on Visual and Industrial Cultures in Nineteenth-Century Britain, ed. Kate Nichols, Rebecca Wade and Gabriel Williams (Manchester UP, 2016) and ‘Involuntary presence: copying, printing, and multiplying line’ TRACEY online journal of contemporary drawing research special issue ‘Drawing as presence’ ISSN 1742-3570 http://www.lboro.ac.uk/microsites/sota/tracey/journal/pres1.html

Edwin Pickstone (b.1982, Manchester, UK) lives and work in Glasgow. Focusing on the material nature of print Pickstone uses letterpress technology, collaborating with artists and designers on a wide range of projects. His work spans academic, artistic and design worlds, with particular interest in the history of typography, graphic design, the nature of print and the book. He is currently Lecturer, Typography Technician and Designer in Residence at The Glasgow School of Art, where since 2005 he has cared for the school’s collection of letterpress printing equipment. He has spoken and exhibited internationally.