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STEPH MASTORIS
Location
Swansea
Social Media
Media
Letterpress
Title of work
‘Directly the bed is called for …’, 2024
Letterpress on A4 Fabriano 200 gsm paper
‘Considering how common illness is …’, 2024
Letterpress on A4 Fabriano 160 gsm paper
Bio
Steph Mastoris is a Swansea-based typographic artist who uses traditional letterpress techniques. His work is concerned with the power and elegance of letter- and word-forms.
Steph is also interested in exploring the subtleties of language where punctuation, form and layout can change or create ambiguities of meaning. More subtly, Steph uses small typographic triptychs to draw attention to the three-dimensional quality of language that arises when similar-sounding words and the different silences between them are exhibited in plain, hand-printed type.
Steph Mastoris was born in Cardiff, studied at London University and has worked in museums in Nottingham, Leicestershire and Wales. He has exhibited at various galleries in Swansea, Bath, Nagoya & Kyoto Japan, Venice, and Ottawa.
These two type-works are ‘love-letters’ to the language Virginia Woolf uses in the keynote text for this exhibition. It is a curious essay with a fascinating thesis of how illness changes one’s perception of everyday things. Woolf’s diction is amazing, but I also find the text infuriating for its very long sentences and a rather rambling concluding section.
In Directly the bed… I want to celebrate the idea of the sick as deserters from the normal world by echoing a bureaucratic rubber stamp in the over-printed red wood-letter type. In Considering how common… the arrangement and colouring of the text (a small portion of a very much longer sentence) attempts to tease out the highs and lows of being ill.
