Richard Studer

Richard's largest project to date, Endangered & Extinct - An Engravers Alphabet is a series of 25 wood engravings completed in Autumn 2024

This project is a celebration of the weird & the wonderful in the world around us. What began as a technical excercise in lettering and mark making (the engraver’s equivalent of a needlework sampler) quickly developed into what you see today. The alphabet had its own energy, each finished letter adding to the narrative of the piece and spurring me on to the next engraving over the five months it took to complete the project.

The subjects were chosen not on their aesthetics but on their quirkiness of character. Some species have been lost or are threatened by mans stupidity, some obliterated by meteorites or threatened by the pet trade, some are here to celebrate their unique adaptations that make them simulateously vulnerable and successful in the niches they inhabit and one because its sub species evolved to exist on a diet of dead insects and bat shit and that amused me..

Each subject has its own story: Pablo Escobars Hippos who thanks to a drug baron’s death are thriving on one continent and considered a pest on another, the ubiquitous Ginkgo Tree - extinct in the wild for nearly two centuries but saved by the monastery monks who recognised its beauty, the immortal Jellyfish who can retreat backwards in time to its juvenile polyp stage when conditions get tough and at least one subject who found it’s way onto the alphabet not for its own vulnerability but that its success adapting to a changing climate has lead to the population collapse of others.

Evolution has been said to be driven not by the survival of the fittest but the survival of the least bad option - if so then we have this to thank for the quirkiness of nature’s sense of humour...