Nicholas Sloan
I have been fascinated by letter design since my schooldays in the sixties. I started cutting letters in stone in the seventies, and have worked freelance ever since, always keeping a balance of memorial work with other commissions, often collaborative artworks, mostly with the poet Ian Hamilton Finlay.
I enjoy working within the letter-cutting tradition, but I have a non-purist approach to style and technique: while nearly all my letters are cut by hand, and letter-design is at the heart of it, I enjoy the challenge of designing for mechanical techniques and unusual materials.
Colour is important to me, not just for its own sake, but because it can be helpful in articulating an inscription, or simply making it more legible. Printing and typography have always been a parallel interest, and it is easy to detect a typographic flavour in much of my lettering.
