PRESENTATON: Raffaella della Olga-Typescripts

Raffaella della Olga makes unique artist’s books using modified typewriters and multicolor ink ribbons on a range of materials—from tracing paper to photo paper to sandpaper. Della Olga is seeking refuge from the limitations of language, she grinds down the characters on her machines and communicates through form, color, texture, and rhythm.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Clark Art Institute Archive

In her first solo museum exhibition, titled “Typescripts”, Raffaella della Olga offers a bold redefinition of what a book — or a text — can be. Eschewing conventional language, she transforms mechanical typewriters into instruments of abstraction, producing works that communicate through the sensual qualities of form, color, texture, and rhythm. Over the past decade, della Olga has been working with modified typewriters, multicolor ink-ribbons, and unconventional surfaces — from tracing paper, photo paper, even sandpaper, to fabric, canvas, and wood — binding them into “artists’ books,” typed paintings, and cut-fabric wall hangings.

Her process is at once sculptural and performative. Paper is dragged, ink ribbons are smudged, textile is drawn through the carriage — these are not texts but gestures. Typing becomes playing; the typewriter becomes a musical instrument; the result is graphic notation, dense with texture but silent to the alphabet. In doing so, della Olga places herself in conversation with a long but seldom-linear history of typewriter art — a lineage that spans from the very first documented typewriter drawing (by Flora Fanny Stacey in 1898) to mid-20th-century experiments and into contemporary practices.

“Typescripts” gathers thirteen of della Olga’s artists’ books, seven typed paintings, three textile works, and one wall-hanging “typescript.” Some of these books come from the Special Collections at the Clark Art Institute Library; others are recent productions.

In parallel, the show presents a curated selection of rare and historically important artists’ books and typewriter artworks — from the late 19th century to today — drawn from the Clark’s collection. This archival component situates della Olga’s work within a broader continuum, underscoring how her typewriters are both homage and radical reimagining of the medium’s potential.

The contrast between archival works and della Olga’s bold, material experiments amplifies her contribution to the field: not as a revivalist, but as an innovator whose practice opens typewriting to texture, color, textile, and sculptural form.

Each of della Olga’s books is titled with a sequential number preceded by “T” — standing for “tapuscrit,” the old French term for “typescript.” This choice is more than nominal: it signals a deliberate engagement with the history of the typewritten word, even as the work itself seeks to move away from legibility.

Through her violent, forceful keystrokes, she “grinds down” typewriter characters until they dissolve. Paper becomes skin, fabric becomes page, texture becomes syntax. In some works she uses colored carbon papers or multicolor ribbons, creating layered, painterly surfaces; in others, she inserts textiles directly into the carriage, letting the weave and grain of the cloth inform the visual rhythm.

By embedding textiles, sandpaper, tracing-paper and other nontraditional materials in her typewriter practice, della Olga asserts that texture and tactility can carry meaning as effectively — if not more — than words. Her works are not only visual poems but sensory ones.

In recent years, della Olga has extended her practice beyond sheets and books. Her “vertical adventure” — a series she calls TP (typed painting) and Haute-Isle — consists of works typed on canvas or textured paper, often primed with oil paint and then passed through her typewriters. The result are pointillist compositions, grids, stripes — abstract pictures that evoke weaving, digital screens, or film-strips.

Simultaneously, her textile works (called Stoffe, Italian for “fabrics”) transform found fabrics — tartans, plaids, suiting wools — by excising negative spaces defined by a grid and draping the resulting surfaces over spent fluorescent tubes. These wall-hanging pieces hover between drawing, weaving, sculpture and installation; they suggest the absence of text, or the trace of a former language, reimagined as sheer surfaces of light, shadow, and void.

Della Olga often describes many of her works as “graphic scores” — not meant to be read as texts, but as notations of ambient sound, silence, or rhythm. The act of typing becomes performance; the typewriter, instrument; the paper — the stage.

This performative quality recalls other typewriter-artists who treated the keyboard as a drawing tool or vector for concrete poetry — but della Olga’s work privileges abstraction over representation, material over meaning, sensation over semantics. In that sense, her “books” resist closure: they offer open invitations, not stories.

At a moment when the book as physical object increasingly coexists with its digital twin, “Typescripts” asserts the power of the book — and of text — as material, sculptural, and multisensory.

By foregrounding the geometry of the grid, the weight of keystrokes, the texture of paper and textile, della Olga challenges us to reconsider what it means to write, to read, to record — even if nothing is legible. Her books are not containers of information but generators of experience.

Photo: Raffaella della Olga, T40, 2023, Typewritten with carbon paper and ink ribbon on copy paper and tracing paper, with PVC cover, 16 1/2 x 11 3/4 in. (42 x 29.7 cm), Clark Art Institute Library, Williamstown, Massachusetts. Acquired by the Clark with support from Jay and Mercedes Nawrocki

Info: Curator: Robert Wiesenberger,Clark Art Institute, 225 South St, Williamstown, MA, USA, Duration: 22/1182025-31/5/2026, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-17:00, www.clarkart.edu/