Being a beekeeper, Maartje Smits was troubled to learn about the disappearance of wild bee species. Not only will our natural environment be impoverished, so will our language. 

This sparked the project Words learned/lost - a series of letterpress prints. On the one hand they represent language we will lose, like the names of glaciers, the names of cruise ships that will be banned from the city, or the 46 wild bee species that have disappeared from the Netherlands. Each word is set by the artist in lead type, letter by letter, and printed on a printing press. With this slow, painstaking process, Smits wants to emphasize the poetic beauty of the words before they will be lost to us. 

Parallel to this she works on a print which represents the language gained by her youngest child who is just learning to speak. As his vocabulary grows, so does the print. Each month is represented by a new printing pass.