The Card Beside the Work: A Year of Labels That Got Read to the End

Last February I stood behind a trestle table in a village hall near Malmesbury and watched a woman read the label beside one of my prints. She got three lines in, frowned, and moved on. The label said something about ‘materiality’, ‘liminal edges’ and ‘an ongoing dialogue with place’. The print was a linocut of a bus shelter. I had written the label at eleven at night and it showed.

That was the start of a small, stubborn experiment. Over the next twelve months I rewrote the cards beside my work for six different hangs: two village halls, a library display case, a café wall in Frome, a church room during a makers’ fair, and one very cold scout hut. I kept the old labels in a folder. I wrote new ones, six lines maximum, and I paid attention to what people did with them. Not in a formal survey way — more in the way you notice who lingers by the table and who walks straight past.

The label nobody read

The first thing I learned was that most labels are written for other makers. That is not a crime. When you spend weeks cutting lino or mixing colour, you want to explain the decisions. You want someone to see the work. But a visitor in a café has about four seconds and a coffee getting cold. They are not there to be educated. They are there to look.

My old labels were doing too many jobs. They were artist statement, process note, price list and apology, all on one A6 card. No wonder people skipped them. The bus shelter label had taken me twenty minutes to write and roughly two seconds to lose.

Start with the question, not the theory

The rewrite began with a simple rule: write the answer to the question a normal person would actually ask. Not ‘what is your practice?’ but ‘what am I looking at?’ Not ‘how does this interrogate the landscape?’ but ‘where was this made?’

So the bus shelter label became: ‘Bus shelter, outside Malmesbury. Linocut from three blocks. I waited there in the rain for forty minutes and liked the colour of the wet tarmac.’ Six lines. No fog. The woman who had walked past the first version came back later, read it, and said, ‘I know that shelter.’ Then she asked how I got the grey.

That was the shift. The label stopped being a barrier and became a doorway. People did not need my whole philosophy. They needed a way in.

The six-line test

I started testing every label against a six-line limit. Six lines on an A6 card, typed in a plain font at a size I could read from a metre away. If it did not fit, it was probably doing too much. The limit forced me to choose.

I also cut the word ‘explores’. I cut ‘juxtaposition’. I cut ‘interrogates’. I kept ‘because’. I kept ‘I’. I kept the odd specific detail — a street name, a colour, a sound, the fact that the frame was made from an old floorboard. Specifics are readable. Abstractions are not.

At the café in Frome I put two versions beside similar prints for a fortnight: the old statement-style label and the new six-line one. The café owner said the new one got more comments. I am not going to pretend that is a scientific study. It was a café, not a research lab. But the pattern held across the year. The plainer labels got read. The plainer labels got questions. The questions were better.

What people actually asked

Once the labels were readable, the questions changed. They stopped being ‘what does this mean?’ and became ‘how did you do the sky?’, ‘is that the lane behind the Co-op?’, ‘how long does one take?’ and ‘do you sell the frame?’ Those are good questions. They are the questions of someone who has looked.

A few people asked about price. That is fine. A label should not hide the fact that work is for sale, but it should not lead with it either. I put the price at the bottom, same size as the rest, no apology. Some work found a home after someone read a label that mentioned the actual place. A print of a library steps found a buyer because the label said which library. A small etching of a gate went to a woman who had walked through that gate every day for thirty years. The label was not a sales pitch. It was a handshake.

A card you can borrow

Here is the template I now use. It is not sacred. It is just a way to start.

1. What it is, in plain words: ‘Linocut of a bus shelter.’
2. Where it came from: ‘Drawn outside Malmesbury, November.’
3. How it was made, briefly: ‘Three blocks, oil-based ink, Somerset paper.’
4. One human detail: ‘I waited in the rain for forty minutes.’
5. Size and edition, if relevant: ‘A4 image, edition of twelve.’
6. Price or contact, quietly: ‘£45. Ask at the counter.’

Six lines. No more. If I need to say more, I put a small QR code to a page on my site, or I put a notebook beside the work. Most people will not use it. That is fine. The card has done its job if someone stops long enough to look properly.

What I would tell another maker

Do not write the label last, at eleven at night, when you are tired and want to sound clever. Write it the next morning, read it aloud, and cut the first sentence. The first sentence is usually you clearing your throat.

And do not confuse simplicity with dumbing down. Plain English is not small. It is exact. It respects the person standing in front of the work. It says: you are welcome here, and here is what you need to know.

Twelve months in, I still have the old labels in a folder. I keep them as a reminder. The bus shelter print is gone now — sold, I think, to someone who liked the wet tarmac. The new label is still on my desk, six lines, no fog. It gets read.