Kinships

Thank you for entrusting me to write something zingy about fonts. I am no expert. I have never learned more than the basic vocabulary of those animated letters. Yet words such as kerning and leading give me reasons to think about the infinite and intimate shared spaces between things. They tell me why medieval stained glass windows are so cool—each figure exists in its own area with distinct colors leaded together to create a complex narrative. Since I’m a shape and color person, and I don’t oversimplify those terms, I can qualify. Why do I find typefaces so “crushable”? In the most fundamental way, glyphs are sentient shapes, black on a white field, the distant cousins from long-ago letters that communicated at the speed of calligraphy.

I don’t always know why we attempt to name things that are visual; they exist in their own language. However, I do know that what we name things can change the way we think. For example, the color white doesn’t exist. It’s more a receiver or a reflector. Somehow, white always seems lost in some abyss, until a black shape drops into place and gives white a purpose to hold something meaningful. I also know that black is the most reliable way to hold space in a place where more work needs to be done. What we name something matters. Are things even things if they are not named? For instance, the name Polymode tells me it’s for everyone, in every position, in every color. I see letters hanging out with each other, chumming around, filling space with a geometry that is balanced and thoughtful, getting into it, and debating with a spirited level of tolerance necessary at this very moment.

But I am failing at the conceit here: to frame how I, an artist, who is Latinx, with a diasporic relationship to a motherland, think about and use a font as an expression of lived experience. My questions are broad. Why the ellipsis here or the truncation there? These are questions about belonging. I’m not sure what my homeland is or why the political boundaries of countries should define any of us. I belong on the planet. I belong to the trees and the sunrise. I belong to the people I love, in the home I build with my family, and with the friends I talk to about art and design. I belong to the shape of a word on a page, a painting on a wall, and the colors I use to form them.

Belonging is largely a question about proximity, built relationships, kinships, and time spent together. It is time together in the same area, with the placement of the tall, short, large, and small subjects commingling in a space together all at once. I think this could also be a poetic description of my paintings, a stained glass window, or a typeface. There are so many different parts that together make a whole. The best type asks us: How will these shapes and colors conjured on a blank field all manage to share space together?