Errata or, The Chapel Ghost
A print is a spectral thing, a residual trace left behind a very simple and everyday occurrence: bodies approach each other, touch, then part. This act of imprinting can be as deliberately engineered as the printed page, or, as with a finger-print, a foot-print, the inevitable, often accidental, result of bodies pressing/impeding other bodies in the world.
In this work a certain act of mischief is visited upon the “body of print”. It draws loosely upon a personal anecdote supplied by the historical figure of Benjamin Franklin while he served as a printer’s apprentice in 18th C. London (England). Like all good tales it is a story of orderliness and disturbance; a “mixing of sorts” and a “breaking of matter”. It is in a sense a kind of ghost story, or perhaps, a ghost in the works. In an act of mischief ascribable to the "Chapel Ghost” the foot of the apprentice is tripped up approaching the stairs, bearing a case of lead type. Things are given over to gravity. Everything (the case, the type, and the “dupe”) tumbles and disperses, head over heels, face over foot. This scenario suggests a kind of misstep, or what in printing is called, “errata”.