Rose Nordin is a graphic designer and artist based in London and is currently in residence at Somerset House Studios, London. She is a founding member of OOMK (One of My Kind) art publishing collective, focused on supporting self-publishing as “a vehicle to an independent validation to ones’ own culture, history, politics and sense of self” [John La Rose]. Collectively, OOMK runs community Risograph press called Rabbits Road Press. Former Social Practice fellow at the University of Chicago (2017) and currently an associate lecturer at UAL, Rose teaches across BA and MA Visual Communication in publishing, speculative design and socially engaged practice.
Rose functions independently as an artist and graphic designer with an emphasis on publishing as creative and social practice. She produces publications and printed matter, often embedded in educational projects, research residencies or exhibitions. Rose has a focused interest in typography books as sites of collaboration and the book as an object of representation. Key publications include: The Place is Here: The Work of Black Artists in 1980s Britain (Van Abbe Museum, Sternberg Press, 2019), Still I Rise: Feminism, Gender and Resistance (Nottingham Contemporary, 2018), Shy Radicals (Book Works, Hamja Ahsan, 2017).
Through the Archipelagos in Reverse Research Network public programme, she will work to establish STUART, an experimental publishing and design studio. The studio will belong to the work of iniva with its “character” a homage to Stuart Hall. In close, on-going collaboration with iniva and Stuart Hall Library, STUART will be engaged in praxis, informed by collective research and the library and archives. STUART will act as a conduit to programming at iniva and educational experimentation though publications that document research and conversation, a publishing school and artist collaboration in graphic material. The focus of the research will be to develop a visual language for STUART that speaks to the archipelagic thinking of Stuart Hall’s work. Hall locates his identity and perspective at “the heart of dislocation” with “out of placeless as a way of learning how to think”. This transdisciplinary manifestation of thinking present in Hall’s writing, will be applied to the design processes and visual identity of STUART. Conceptually worked into the graphic language and typeface designs, STUART will act as a critical space for re-imagining publishing and design in gallery and library settings. Considering the archipelagic relationships between the gallery, the library, the publics, artists and curators. Considering these connections as the “island-island movements, not static forms”, she will position the design studio as the water that surrounds these locations.