Oversp!ll was shown as part of ‘Overpr!nt’, a group exhibition curated by Jean Pierre Muller at the Centre de la Gravure et de l'Image Imprimée in La Louvière, Belgium (2018). Developed from a long-running collaboration between European art schools under the Printmaking Union, the exhibition positioned print as a historical vehicle for dissent and counter-information; the subversive potential of what is written between, beneath, or beyond official lines.

Laas's contribution took that premise and emptied it of its meaning. Oversp!ll is a book constructed by hand from sheets of laser-cut perspex, its pages present and legible in form but stripped of content – the lines where text would normally sit had been hollowed out into reservoirs, each one filled with liquid alcohol.

Alcohol here is not incidental. It preserves and distorts simultaneously, the chemical of archiving and of forgetting, of sterilisation and of dissolution. Poured into the exact grooves where meaning would reside, it replaced the words with a substance that acts on the body rather than the mind, that blurs rather than transmits. Where the printed word historically carried

ideas across borders and past censors, Oversp!ll carries only the outline of that possibility – the architecture of communication held intact while its contents have been replaced with something that intoxicates rather than informs.

Over the course of the exhibition, the alcohol began to work on the perspex itself. The book deformed, its structure bending under the pressure of what it was built to contain. The work had always been about the failure of form to hold meaning; now it enacted that failure in material terms, the container undone by its own contents. What began as a static object became a durational one, its final state further from its origin than the artist had anticipated and, in the end, closer to its own argument.

The title names what happens when a container exceeds its capacity – when the structure built to hold something can no longer do so. Inside a show concerned with the power of the printed word, Oversp!ll asks what remains when the word has been consumed from within.