Utopia Press takes the form of a mobile outsized letterpress studio. Transported in a backpack with a ladder frame, the project is designed for collective use. We each carry parts of the pack out into the forest, stop and engage in meditative prompts for imagining the future, and then collectively write a text that I print on a 3’ x 30’ banner, which will hang from the trees. The project was inspired by the utopian founders of Fruitlands who, in the mid nineteenth century, set themselves to reimagine all aspects of daily life, from diet to family structure, from the home to economies, with the aim of creating a new ideal Eden, free from traditional societal restrictions, where all persons could seek their full potential, and a model on which all future society would be based. Its impetus in 2020 is the complex challenge of maintaining hope, engaging in radical imaginative action, and provoking world remaking ideas for our time.
Watch a short film about Utopia Press, Filmed in the original Fruitlands Farmhouse and in the forest trails of the Nashua River Valley, and shot, edited, and directed by Sue Murad in 2020.
Utopia Press, 2019/20
A 38' Tyvek banner printed in walnut ink with words by Robin Wall Kimmerer hanging on the path into the forest
Taking Utopia Press into the forest trails in the Nashua River Valley, Harvard, MA
Utopia Press in A. Bronson Alcott's library in the Fruitlands farmhouse
Printing a banner in a forest glade on the trails through the Nashua River Valley
A series of gatherings invited people through embodied scores to sense the forest in new ways. From those experiences, we coauthored a phrase to print and hang in the forest glade.
Utopia Press font: I designed a downloadable font for the project based on Paul Renner’s 1927 typeface Futura, whose simple forms and emphasis on modernism and industrialization have become ubiquitous today. I combined the modernist forms with those of old wood type forms and domestic architectures to create a typeface that spans the utopian designs of the mid 1800s with a sense of our lived spaces.
inks, goldenrod, sumac drupes, a morter and pestle
Ink lab: an open air ink laboratory for foraging and making ink from the forest, including a solar oven to steep the inks
Speaking of the Future: a zine containing meditation prompts and 100 quotes by utopian thinkers from Thomas Moore to today provides a springboard for collective imagination.
words: Charles Lane, next to the farmhouse entering the forest
words: J. Marsching, at the field's edge
words: Ursula K. LeGuin, in a pine grove
Check out this very short video preview of Utopia Press at Fruitlands. Shot in my studio during the early months of Covid-19 in Hyde Park, MA.