Logos and glyphs grow out of agar and grapevines in Emi Takahashi’s graphic explorations of living forms

When we reach out to interview creatives, they aren’t always available straight away. In the case of Emi Takahashi, the Montreal-based artist and designer kindly replied to inform us that she was “currently at an intensive stone-carving workshop and conference” (hosted by Jules Durand) in Lurs, France, “with limited access to a computer or the internet,” so would probably be able to get back to us the following week. For a designer that draws from living materials for analogue image-making, animation and glyph and type design inspired by nature’s forms, you could say a stone-carving workshop certainly fit the bill.

This isn’t the artist’s first creative upskilling through a niche craft, however, Emi has also learnt the art of washi papermaking and even harvested and processed kozo fibres in Kochi, Japan. Her projects have indulged in all kinds of unusual explorations with flora, their techniques varied but always leaning on a “close attention to the natural substances and material experimentation, always negotiating between intervention and letting the substance shape the work”, she says. “I’m especially drawn to visualising hidden patterns and languages within the more-than-human world, translating the logics and structures I perceive in these natural systems, both living and elemental, into graphic form.”

These visual translations and interventions with nature have taken on many forms. The designer has produced a set of custom glyphs for Ganni using cyanotype printing on agar with varied exposure times and some citric acid. She’s spent a day animating duckweed in a swap for A24 in collaboration with experimental animator Nik Arthur, and even made a logo and subsequent typeface out of mould for LA-based creative studio Human Person. Emi’s organic, material-based work pushes anything you think might be possible with plant matter and never fails to encapsulate, in all their unpredictability, the living breathing nature of the systems that fill her with creative wonder.