Having worked as a lecturer and graphic designer for nearly twenty years, Nick Pride has recently turned away from commercial practice to concentrate more on personal projects.

Alongside Nick's work as a designer, he researches type and typography, particularly vernacular typography and ephemera of a kind that is fast disappearing - that produced for specific uses by small local printers - tickets, posters and labels often completely disassociated from the values and processes attached to Graphic Design. This exhibition consists of large-scale typographic collages of printed material that the artist has collected on his travels. In fact, a large part of making the work is the traveling, the collecting, and a kind of typographic hunting.

"I fills boxes and boxes with the stuff I gather - as precious to me as flowers. My collection goes back perhaps ten years."

Looking closely at the works on display, one can see a precise record of parts of the artist's life, and the lives of other people. A till receipt puts the artist in a particular place at a time recorded to the second. An airline label maps a journey long after the details of date, airport, seat number and flight have been forgotten. Our lives leave a trail of numbers, letters and coded data: records of our being somewhere. These objects are the typographic footprints we leave behind us.

Some parts of the collages are made very carefully to tell a story, and if you wish you can uncover hidden messages, little narratives. There are meanings in some places that you can discover, or interpret as you wish. For example, an 'X' - a symbol which occurs regularly in the work - is many things: a kiss hopefully, but also a canceling out, a vote, a multiplier, something banned, a mark to find treasure, a hazard, or simply the letter 'x'. You will often find a meaning in the work that repays your curiosity.