For some reason I had a book of ornamental letters that was purchased from the University of Saskatchewan bookstore in 1994 for $7.50. I thought maybe my mom gave this book to me but no, it seems I must have bought it. I have no idea why I did that or what I initially planned on doing with it — especially as I was busy having babies in 1994 and being poor. This winter, at some point between having covid and trying to survive the deep freeze, I set about cutting out all the letters in the book. It was kind of relaxing even though I had no idea what I was going to do with a box of cut up letters. Well, probably I was thinking about how I could make keys out of them as that seems to be a bit of a theme for me.

Somewhere along the way of my life I learned about a method where glue or tape could be used to capture the ink from a photocopy. I had even tried this out before on my Infinite Sadness sculpture. I wondered if this would work on these cut up letters using resin so I gave that a go. The test pieces were promising so I set about making many paper keys and then coated them with resin.

Once I had several keys made I coated them with resin.

Sometimes the resin got underneath the paper which made things a bit difficult. And sometimes I did not coat the resin evenly, which made scraping off the paper and not the ink more difficult. Eventually I figured out that it was best to soak the keys in water before trying to get any extra resin off the back.

Several keys and lots of paper scraps on the floor later, I decided to try sticking the keys directly onto tuck tape - this has been helpful in keeping the resin off the back of the keys and also in removing the first layer of paper. This method made for some wavy keys though and, in some cases, caused the keys to rip apart more easily. For the next batch of keys I will try laying out the tuck tape sticky side up and then taping it flat. This should provide a more even surface than what I had been doing - which was sticking a key onto some tape and then folding the tape over so that I could stick it to the board.

Some of these keys have turned out better than others but I have decided to persevere through the repairs and adjustments and include each key I make. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far: