About our Press

Fire Ecology Press 🌳🔥🌱 was founded in 2022 by printmaker Jameson Alea. (That's me!)

While I'm actually still fairly new to printmaking, learning letterpress in early 2021 changed my life in a much more profound way than I expected. The first time I made a poster on a Vandercook press and got to hold the physical object that I made, I just got this intense sense that this is what I was meant to be doing. And since then, it has been!

My home studio is Book Arts in Buffalo, NY. It's where I learned letterpress and it's still where I do most of my work. It's a great studio that I feel fortunate to be a member of. We have three vintage Vandercook presses, several more small platen presses, and a truly impressive type library, as well as a separate, full screenprinting studio. I was the studio resident at Book Arts from January to March 2022, and now I am a teaching artist there. (You can check this link to see if I have any letterpress workshops coming up!)

I'm also a member of the Flower City Arts Center in Rochester, NY, and I did a short artist residency at Zygote Press in Cleveland, OH. 

The Tarot of Sorts

My studio residency project at Book Arts was called the Tarot of Sorts, and it is by far the largest artistic project I've ever undertaken. 

I designed and hand printed a 28 card tarot deck, consisting of the 22 traditional major arcana cards, plus 6 bonus cards invented by me. There was an exhibition for the Tarot of Sorts at Book Arts on March 18th, 2022. The hand-printed deck exists in a limited run of 35 decks, but in May 2022, I also ran a successful kickstarter that allowed me to have a 500-deck print run made of reproduction decks with corresponding guidebooks.

I was touched by the overwhelmingly positive and excited response to the Kickstarter, the support from all my backers, and the interest from folks who missed the campaign! One of the main factors in starting Fire Ecology Press and the online shop was to make the tarot deck available to anyone who wants a copy.

About Jameson Alea

Jamey Alea (they/he, previously Jameson Hampton) is an artist and poet whose work is informed by their interests in history, magic, and alchemy. They were born and raised in the Buffalo area and graduated from Canisius College with a degree in digital art and computer science, which led them to a career as a software engineer, public speaker and podcast producer.

Nevertheless, Jamey remains passionate about art and works in various mediums, primarily letterpress but also photography and collage. He's also passionate about zines and the artistic DIY culture around them, and he used to act as the zine librarian at the former Sugar City Arts Collective. 

In the Media

Making Old Things New Again: Jameson Hampton & the Tarot of Sorts - Little Red Tarot

Finding Empowerment With New Work: A Conversation with Studio Resident Jameson Hampton - Book Arts