Marker.
Marker
Ramp Gallery, Hamilton
2012
Curated by Kim Paton
Marker proposes a new typographic character—a Southern Cross to replace the letter ‘T’—as a way of delineating a New Zealand accent. An ongoing project, it was sparked by a group exhibition of the same name at Ramp Gallery in Hamilton in 2012, for which twelve designers were each asked to produce a black-and-white, plan-printed poster related to the word or concept ‘marker’.
A few hours after the time of this poster’s publication, on the 29th of May 2012 as part of Marker, Ramp Gallery, Waikato, New Zealand, the Southern Cross will sit upright and almost directly above us in the night sky. The stars that form the constellation may be millions of light years apart from each other, separated by a big black void, but due to our position in the universe—perched on a small blue planet—we connect them to one another, and we see the shape of a cross.
The Southern Cross has, for centuries, served travellers as a mark, indicating position in time and space; because the southern sky lacks an easily visible pole star, the top and bottom points of the cross, Acrux and Gacrux, are commonly used to find south, and the constellation points equally to location as a symbol of identity, emblazoned on the flags of many Southern Hemisphere nations—most often with a fifth star, though never when representing New Zealand.
The poster is a proposal, a draft plan, in which the points of the Southern Cross stand in for a ‘T’ both to sign the poster’s origin and its designer’s identity as from New Zealand rather than anywhere else, and to act as an accent, specifying that the text is to be read in a New Zealand voice: words that may have originated in the other hemisphere, here spoken by a New Zealander.
