Keira Rathbone Typewriter Artist

I'm a West London based artist originally from Dorset, I studied Fine Art at UWE, Bristol. My background is in painting and drawing and repetitive marks and my passions are simple- music, people, cycling, walking, badminton and nature. I was in my first year of uni when drawing with a typewriter happened to me, quite by chance. I wanted to type on this old manual typewriter I find in a charity shop, but no words came to me. I thought back to a mixtape my friend Arthur made me and how he'd typed a row of ///'s on it and how that appealed to me, so I set about tapping the same character in a row. Something about the repetition stopped me looking to construct words and allowed me a freedom in using the characters to build visual impressions of a subject to describe them, which I invented a word for with my dad - typictions. Its been 21 years of exploring this medium, which I call my voice and I find the most important part of what I do is the work in public and how they react and engage with me when I'm working on a piece. I'm now putting this at the centre of what I do, as it's a 'way in' to communication with public, people of all ages and backgrounds, and I want to use the conservations, memories, thoughts and ideas into new work in other mediums and larger scales going forwards.