The Word as Image: Alan Riddell and the Art of the Typewriter

How a Scottish poet turned a humble office machine into a radical instrument of visual art — and helped define one of the twentieth century’s most daring literary movements.

This exhibition ended in June 2026.

Alan Riddell (1927–1977) was born in Townsville, Australia, and educated in Scotland, where he received his MA from the University of Edinburgh. A poet, journalist and visual artist, he went on to found Lines, an influential Scottish poetry magazine, before making his mark on the international avant-garde with two landmark works: Eclipse (1972) and Typewriter Art (1975). It is this second volume — a sweeping anthology of typographical artwork spanning eight decades — for which he is most widely celebrated today.

Typewriter art, or “artyping,” exploits the grid-like regularity of a typewriter’s keys to build images, patterns and texts that operate simultaneously as both language and picture. The technique has a longer history than many suppose: practitioners were experimenting with the form as far back as the 1890s. Riddell’s anthology brought together 119 works by 65 artists from 18 countries, tracing the tradition from its Victorian origins through the Bauhaus and on into the experimental ferment of the 1960s and 70s.

Illustrative examples — not by Riddell

    . * . * . * . * .
  * . * . * . * . * .
. * . * . * . * . * .
  . * . * . * . * . *
    * . * . * . * . *
      . * . * . * . *
        * . * . * . *
          . * . * . *
            * . * . *
              . * . *
                * . *
                  . *
                    *

Cascade — pattern built on repeating keystrokes

p  o  e  t  r  y
 p  o  e  t  r  y
  p  o  e  t  r  y
   p  o  e  t  r  y
    p  o  e  t  r  y
     p  o  e  t  r  y
      p  o  e  t  r  y
       p  o  e  t  r  y
        p  o  e  t  r  y
         p  o  e  t  r  y
          p  o  e  t  r  y
           p  o  e  t  r  y

Diagonal cascade — a word becomes a texture

Riddell was at pains to situate the medium within concrete poetry, a movement that emerged internationally in the 1950s and sought to collapse the boundary between text and image. For concrete poets, the typographical arrangement of words on the page was not incidental but essential — the form was the meaning. In his own collection Eclipse, Riddell wove letters and words into shapes that could reinforce or deliberately undermine the apparent message of a piece, producing visual puns and tensions that neither pure text nor pure image could achieve alone.

Illustrative examples — not by Riddell

          |
         /|\
        / | \
       /  |  \
      / w | o \
     / o  |  r \
    / r   |   d \
   / d    |    s \
  /       |       \
 /________|________\

Structure built from punctuation marks alone

S c o t l a n d
 c o t l a n d S
  o t l a n d S c
   t l a n d S c o
    l a n d S c o t
     a n d S c o t l
      n d S c o t l a
       d S c o t l a n
        S c o t l a n d

A word rotated into a visual field

What makes Riddell’s work so enduring is its insistence on the humanity of the machine. The typewriter, once celebrated as a marvel of modernity, became in his hands an instrument of intimate creative expression — its limitations transformed into a distinctive aesthetic vocabulary. We are delighted to bring this remarkable body of work out from our archives, and invite you to discover how, in Riddell’s words and images, the mechanical and the poetic become one.

This exhibition ended in June 2026.

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