Letterpress printing / Free Dinners

 

This project is called Free Dinners. This was created in response to a question on the RA Schools application form, 'If you were at high school after 1980, did you ever have free school meals during your time at high school?'. I understand why these questions are asked (to see if you were disadvantaged in high school and to ensure its a fair intake of pupils across the socio economic landscape). However, this question stopped me in my tracks. I had forgotten about the stigma of free dinner tickets and it made me feel quite emotional. I think only the people who had free dinner tickets would understand or remember these tickets so I wanted to create an artwork for those people. They will remember the 'walk of shame' to the front of the class on Monday morning, when your name was called out, to collect your 5 tickets. A concept which seems so antiquated now. Thankfully children with free meals are not identified by class mates as the funding goes directly onto their accounts. Paid for using their thumb print.

My research started with online searching for an image of the tickets. I couldn't find any from Manchester education dept. I finally found one from Birmingham and it looked the same apart from the city name at the top of the ticket. It's interesting no one wanted to record these tickets for the future. They have been lost in the 'things to be forgotten' section of the past.

I wanted to recreate these tickets as they were part of my childhood and also like to see how far we have come with our social practices. My plan was to use letterpress, also a part of my childhood. My Dad was a printer and for a few years he had a working Heidelburg Platten printing press in the garage of our house. He printed business cards, wedding invites and local information posters. I helped him with this work (unpaid!) sealing the gold foil on the oven's grill and general 'dogs body' work. I enjoyed it and worked in printing and loved typography ever since. I booked into the universities print workshop to get my project started.

        

My process began with working out what each font was or a similar font because I think someone were bespoke to the education dept. This was an unnecessary task because I soon realised, once I was in the print workshop that there are a limited choice of hot metal fonts available. I then took on the task of finding similar fonts, kerning and spaces to give a feeling of the original ticket.

Building the text line by line in hot metal type is time consuming but really theraputic! I seemed to get into a flow and my mind thought about nothing else but the task in hand. It's interesting that I could easily created these tickets on the Apple Mac in Indesign in about 20 minutes or less. Yet I still feel the time and effort is worth it, a craft which is dying out and should be preserved.

Hot metal type, each piece of metal holds a letter.

Proofing press, each line is printed to check spelling, position and spacing.

One of many proofs, 9 proofs were needed to get to this stage.