Anthony Burrill is the latest artist to contribute to Manchester’s Print and Paste billboard project with a poster made up of individually printed giant woodblock letters

Back in September 2012 we posted about the launch of Print and Paste, a collaborative project which took over a disused poster site in Manchester and invited artists and designers to use it as an exhibition space.

The latest piece of work at the site is North & South – a collaboration between Anthony Burrill, Liam Hopkins of ‘creative services studio’ Lost Heritage and Dave Sedgwick of Print and Paste. “I contacted Anthony as I have always admired his approach to work. Around the same time I was working with Liam at Lost Heritage and he suggested it could be possible to make oversized wood type blocks for the project. We started to talk and it seemed a great idea for Anthony to take on,” says Sedgwick, (who is also the organiser of the BCN MCR exhibition in which designers from Barcelona collaborate with their peers from Manchester).

North & South is a reference to the way in which the project was produced (and also to Burrill who grew up in the north but now lives and works in the south). Burrill designed the letters which were then manufactured by Hopkins using his workshop’s CNC router.

Each letter was printed on the Heidelberg Cylinder press at Adams of Rye in East Sussex, Burrill’s regular printing partner. The prints were then pasted on to the billboard to complete the final piece, as can be seen in this film.

“As soon as Dave contacted me I was keen to be part of it,” Burrill says. “The idea of using wood block type at billboard size was exciting, something I hadn’t seen done before. And of course I was keen to produce a piece of public art for my home town.”

The individual letter prints are now available to buy from Burrill’s website while the original artwork can be seen at Lower Ormond Street just off Oxford Road in Manchester for the rest of January and February 2014.

To submit ideas for consideration for the Print and Paste poster site, send examples of work, with an outline of the intended project, to info@printandpaste.com with the subject line “Proposal – [name]”.

Print and Paste is a collaboration between designers Micah Purnell, Dave Sedgwick, Nick Chaffe and director of The Big Art People, Jim Ralley, and is facilitated by Daniel Jones of MOne Studios.

BCN MCR will be back for 2014 on March 27. Details here