Ölpest

Ölpest is an experimental writing project I started in 2022, and the name is borrowed from the German word for “oil spil.” I was inspired by the meditative nature of  slathering tar on a metal plate for etching, as well as traditional Japanese and Chinese calligraphy. It’s akin freewriting techniques, letting the artist’s mind wander through creation. Working on Ölpest seems to cleanse the mind of ambiguous anxiety, washing the darkness away. In fact, I later found out that art therapists say that using black ink on paper is the most therapeutic of all artistic expressions.

Ölpest lets me explore the power of the calligraphic black stroke — not used for the letters but for the background, freeing it from the constrains of predefined structure otherwise dictated by conventional text. Ölpest is also a script free of meaning, reading and pronunciation. It’s asemic writing, a type of visual poetry, solely an aesthetic expression that plays with type, calligraphy, layout and rhythm.

The artbook is B5 size and has 60 pages