Feature: Exhibition - Typewriter Art by Keira Rathbone is at the Everyman cinema

Published: 11 February 2010
by DAN CARRIER

KEIRA Rathbone’s work stems from a fascination she held as a child with battered old typewriters. The artist, who this week launched an exhibition at Hampstead’s Everyman cinema, uses typewriters to create stunning portraits. Her uncon­ventional medium is the progression of a game we have all probably played as kids on a typewriter – or a computer – while lacking the literary skills to use a keyboard to construct sentences.

She recalls being fascinated by the sight of her grandmother carefully typing out letters on blue airmail envelopes – and as soon as she had finished, Keira would step in and enjoy plonking and plunking away on the chunky keyboard.

“I couldn’t write, so I’d use the letters to make pictures instead,” she remembers. Twenty years later, she bought a typewriter and an exhibition was born.

The Bristol University arts graduate bought her first typewriter on a whim: “I saw an orange one in a charity shop and though I had no use for it, I couldn’t help but buy it,” she says. She now has 20 different typewriters: Olivetti, Imperial and Silver Reed models.

“I really enjoy using dots and dashes to build up a picture,” she says. “There is something so satisfying about using a typewriter, and bashing away at a keyboard, watching the arms with the lettering rise up and down.”

Her more recent works include a commission by London Fashion Week to create pictures of celebrities such as Kate Moss and Bianca Jagger at the Royal Academy using her typewriter. 

And while she has selected pictures of iconic faces in the Everyman show, she has a wide range of images that are just as striking but do not feature recognisable faces. “When I first started, I trawled through local newspapers looking for photographs of interesting people,” she 

• Typewriter Art by Keira Rathbone is at the Everyman cinema, Hollybush Vale, NW3, until February 23, 11am-11pm. www.keirarathbone.com