WORDS never fail the loquacious York artist Dexter, but he is concerned they may soon be failing the next generation.

Obsessed with the past in his memorial plaques to bygone decades, he has unusually looked into the near future and sees the end of hand-writing as we know it.

“Hand-writing is a dying means of communication because it’s been replaced by the keyboard and the mouse,” he says.

“I’m disturbed by the possibility that today’s two year olds will have no need for the hand-written word. What relevance will it have to their lives when they’re 18? Absolutely zilch. That’s why I’m now working on a specific project to ask whether it can find a refuge in art.”

With that in mind, he has set about creating hand-written versions of all of his Dexter World decade pieces. The first to emerge, in a combination of gravestone-grey and haunting, ghostly writing is Dexter’s World Of Eighties, a work now on show at the Open Summer Exhibition at Bar Lane Studios.

“The Eighties was a bleak decade, so I’ve experimented with greys,” he says. “What I’m striving to do is to see if hand-writing can have an aesthetic form to it.”

Ironically, his own hand-writing is very poor. “I’ve never been a tidy writer, and on the first one I’ve done, the writing is all over the place, but when you stand back, there’s something about it that makes it stand out.”

Significantly too, it is the first memorial piece that Dexter has produced with his hands, whereas “everything else has come out of my head and been put together digitally”.

His work is emerging from his new studio “hotspace” at Bar Lane Studios, where he is sharing an upstairs room with such artists as Nathan Chenery, Yvonne Lynn and Kate Young.

“Since the demise of York Arts Centre, we’ve not had a central hub for art in York where artists could generally hang out and exchange ideas, until now,” he says.

“At last the place we wanted is open, offering studio space from £53 a month, exhibition space where you can sell your work and a great café. I urge anyone practising or just with an interest in art to pay a visit to this very creative addition to York.”