Collaborating with Molu Designs at Craft Central
- Ben Sheppee
- Apr 26, 2021
- 1 min read
While based at Craft Central — a studio complex supporting makers and designers in London — I collaborated with Molu Designs, a London-based multi-disciplinary studio specialising in lettering, typographic art installations, and sign-painting.
Shared Territory
The collaboration made immediate sense. Molu's practice is rooted in the physical craft of lettering — hand-painted signs, typographic murals, and bespoke installations where every stroke carries the weight of the maker's hand. My practice approaches typography from the opposite direction: digital, generative, systematic. But both share a fundamental conviction that letters are more than functional carriers of meaning — they're visual forms with their own aesthetic and cultural weight.
Working together at Craft Central allowed us to explore the space between these approaches. The proximity was productive — sharing a studio environment with someone whose relationship to letterforms is physical and embodied challenged me to think differently about the materiality of my own work. The Letragrafika series, which uses transfer lettering on Bristol paper, owes something to that period of cross-pollination between digital and analogue approaches to type.
Craft Central as Context
Craft Central provided a working environment where fine art, design, and making existed side by side without the hierarchies that larger institutions sometimes impose. Being surrounded by jewellers, ceramicists, furniture makers, and textile artists — people who think with their hands — was a useful counterweight to the screen-based nature of much of my practice. It reinforced the importance of the physical object, of the print, of the work that exists in space rather than on a monitor.
