We recently paid artist Yanko Tihov a visit in his studio, where we chatted about his interest in passports, his printmaking and gilding process, and all about his new piece World Passports Colour Wheel!

 

 

Yanko Tihov's process begins with passports. Sourced from friends, relatives, collectors, and auctions over the years, Yanko has amassed an extraordinary collection of passports, with documents from the modern day, and those which are much, much older. "Somehow the documents ended up here, and in a way, they’re like strangers who have met me through my work", Yanko muses.

 

 

Beginning with collage, Yanko plans out the compositions of each of his pieces digitally, and then experiments with different types of printing.

"Quite often I start with a pigment based machine, just to see how the whole thing works, and then it’s a decision of whether I should separate the layers and make a silkscreen out of it, or hand-finish on the digital pigment based print.”

For his London Passport Map 2024, based on the UK census undertaken every 10 years, Yanko worked with silkscreen printing for the base image, however, with his most recent piece World Passports Colour Wheel, the gold gilding is hand done atop the pigment printed base. "It's ultimately about the final result" Yanko says. "So if it works like this does (referring to World Passports Colour Wheel), I like the combination of digital printing and hand-gilding."

 

 

Yanko gilds by first carefully applying specialist gilding glue with a fountain pen, which remains tacky and does not dry down. For Yanko and his small studio team, gilding a whole work usually takes around a day, so this glue is ideal, as there remains plenty of time to apply the gold leaf.

Yanko shared that "the beauty of this is that when you gild it, it will appear as a sort of raised surface," as the glue sits thickly atop the design. "The work becomes more of a hand-made piece, rather than just a generic print. Silkscreen can't really do that, as it's very photographic."

 

 

Yanko's fascination with passports lies in part in their ever changing nature. 'The covers are fascinating, because the design of every cover tells you a lot about the country, and what's going on in that country at the moment." Yanko is also interested in the idea of identity, and how a person's identity, history, and experiences can be held within a single document.

 

 

For World Passports Colour Wheel, Yanko wanted to reinterpret and represent the globe in a new way, focusing in on the colours of each passport, and how they relate to each other. "In today's world, there are only four passport colours", Yanko explained, though there are many different shades. For many countries, the chosen passport colours are signifiers of shared values, political relationships, or geographical ties, often changing with the shifts within the country. For example, the UK passport which was once blue, changed to burgundy in 1988 to match other EU member states, and returned to blue in 2019 following the UK's withdrawal from the EU.

For Yanko, the size of each country was also important for this piece; "I wanted the scale of each country to be more or less identical, so you can actually see them all. For instance, the island of Mauritius is just as big as Canada or India here, so you can see the passport cover just as clearly. Often, on my mapping works, those smaller islands can never be seen."

Yanko Tihov's World Passports Colour Wheel can be viewed and ordered HERE. You can also browse more of Yanko's works over on his artist page.

 

 

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