Grow Not Build Postcards
Design by Alexandra Blom
Printed by Terrence Chouinard
The Chicago Printers Guild invited me to design a series of postcards in collaboration with Letterpress Printer Terrence Chouinard of Wing and Wheel Press. “Grow Not Build” is something Chicago Printers Guild President Eric Von Haynes said to me in a conversation about his ideas for the organization and philosophy more broadly [“Gardening, not architecture” is a quote from a card in the Oblique Strategies deck that Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt created]. This had me thinking about the way in which plants propagate and spread, intertwined with generations as they drop seeds and send out pups, intertwined with the climate and environment, intertwined with bugs and birds; experiential knowledge, culture, network. There is thriving in the symbiosis; upward growth from lateral relationships. This is the ethos of the CPG as I have experienced it and of the printmakers I have met.
