artbreak

Triangulation by Casmic Lab / casmiclab.com

eOne thing always leads to another. For Chris Sleath, it all begin with a dream to restore vintage bikes. He began working on classic racing machines from the 1950s and 60s, and needed a way to fund the habit.

Why not create bicycle-related prints, and sell them?, he thought. Although lacking any formal training, he’d always had an interest in design and illustration, so he did a short, self-initiated printmaking course, then began helping out at a printmaker’s. Then, as these things do, the bicycle art began to take over from the bikes themselves. Soon, Chris found that he’d founded Dynamoworks, and was busy producing limited edition typographic screenprint and letterpress posters, all with a cycling theme.

Boneshaker first met Chris at the inaugural Bespoked Bristol Handmade Bicycle Show, back in 2011. We shared a stall, several beers and even more stories with him over that sun-bleached weekend. Talking to him brings the world of printmaking alive, and reveals parallels between it and the world of cycling. “There’s an immediacy, a direct contact between me and the created thing,” he says. He tries wherever possible to work without involving computers, so that “the process is not filtered through a screen, in the same way that travelling by bicycle puts you immediately in touch with the world around you, instead of filtering it through glass. It’s about that heightened awareness, being in

the environment, feeling, seeing, smelling, hearing – all those things that are going on when you’re on a bike.”

e In a past life he’d worked as a scene painter and set carpenter, so the old wooden blocks of letterpress had an immediate appeal. “When you pick up a piece of type, it’s a bit like being a kid again, they’re like the old-fashioned wooden play blocks”, he says. Chris rides in every day along the river to work as a technician at Edinburgh Printmakers, the oldest, biggest open-access print studio in the UK. “It’s a wonderful place,” he says, “a place where anyone can come in and have a go at lots of different kinds of printing.” When he can, he heads