During the month of December, TAiR welcomes an American graphic designer Joey Hannaford. She is an award-winning graphic designer, typographer and lettering artist and is currently an Associate Professor of Graphic Design at the University of West Georgia near Atlanta, Georgia, US. Joey’s teaching and design practice have a reputation for incorporating the handmade/analog [lettering, letterpress printing, and illustration] into digital contexts. Joey presents widely at national and international conferences and has taught workshops in the US, Europe and Asia. Her work has recently been exhibited at the National Print Museum, Dublin, Ireland, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, England and University of Notre Dame, Indiana.
Joey has never traveled to any of the Baltic countries and she wants her experiences in Tartu and Estonia to inform her direction:
“The best part about travel is that it penetrates your consciousness, but not in a rational way. The same way with artwork…..I feel my best work comes as a result of experiencing/making rather than pre-planning and then producing. [I have always felt that work that is too pre-concieved can easily become dead. ]”
As a graphic designer and printmaker, she Joey loves technology and machinery and has a great reverence for the role of printing in the history of human communications. She’s very excited to have the opportunity to work in the historical environs of the Estonian Print Museum. Recently, she has begun researching “crankies”— a relatively simple machine for telling stories. [to see a crankie in action, please visit this link to see one of my favorites: https://www.youtube.com/watch?
The intention of the residency is to research Estonian folk tales, music, musical instruments, story-songs, textiles, symbolism, textures and indigenous materials and create as many “crankies” as possible:
“Making crankies is a great group activity, so if possible, and hopefully with input from new friends in Tartu, we might make some collaborative crankies and perform them at some point. My husband, who will be accompanying me, is a musician with a great knowledge of Appalachian music. We want to see how this simple storytelling technique might be translated into meaningful cross-cultural Estonia music/storytelling/artwork.”
Joey’s homepage: www.joeyhannaford.com