Gabriella Marcella, a Scottish-Italian designer, has curated an exhibition at Glasgow's Glue Factory Galleries showcasing international art created with risograph printers. The risograph, invented in Japan in the 1980s, is a fast, affordable printer that produces vivid, screenprint-like results using soy inks. Marcella first encountered the machine while studying at New York's Pratt Institute and later founded her own design practice, Risotto Studio, in Glasgow in 2012.
In 2017, Marcella launched Riso Club, a non-profit programme that promotes risograph artists worldwide. For a yearly membership fee, subscribers receive monthly issues of four postcards from four different artists, each issue focusing on a different international city. The club has featured art from cities including Lille, Lima, Kyiv, and Damascus, aiming to highlight creatives outside major urban centres like London and New York.
Marcella emphasises the tactile appeal of physical postcards in an age of digital saturation. 'Physical things land differently. A postcard through the door has a weight, texture and intimacy that digital communication doesn’t,' she says. The postcards also offer a way to discover cultures through artists' perspectives rather than tourist clichés, with some cities carrying political or diasporic significance for members, such as Kyiv and Damascus.
Designer Mari Kinovych curated the Kyiv issue, which served as a fundraiser for Razom for Ukraine. She included a piece by Anna Gavryliuk featuring tank traps and flowers to illustrate the duality of life during war. Kinda Ghannoum, curator of the Damascus issue, aimed to present Syria beyond typical media portrayals, with artists contributing personal reflections on the city and nostalgia for home.
To celebrate 100 issues of Riso Club, Marcella created a special edition featuring her design heroes, including Nathalie Du Pasquier, Peter Shire, and Barbara Stauffacher Solomon. The exhibition at Glue Factory Galleries brings together all 40 issues of the club's postcards, celebrating the global community united by this distinctive printing method.
