40/40 is a suite of prints created in 2013 celebrating Glasgow Print Studio's 40 years in existence. 40 artists associated with Glasgow Print Studio were invited to make editions of 40 prints in whatever print medium they chose.

The typography used in the woodcut can be traced back to a photograph of four abstract concrete trees from 1925 by the sculptors Jan and Joel Martel from which Boyce developed a linear repeat pattern based on their shape. While working on the pattern letters began to appear, eventually an entire alphabet; some orientated correctly, others on their side or even upside down, giving the sense of letters and words tumbling through space.

He started to use the letters to spell out phrases which manifest themselves in different ways, thinking about how people would scratch their names onto park benches or school tables or carve words into trees.

In 2011 Boyce exhibited a sculpture titled ‘Do Words Have Voices’ based on the form of a Jean Prouvé library table from 1951. Using his typography he carved a series of texts into the surface of the table top. In that piece and for the woodcut print the artist was thinking about the written word and the internal voices we create in the process of reading. The text ‘Do Words Have Voices’ come from that question, do we create voices when we read or do words speak to us?

Martin Boyce produced a screenprint for the GPS Habitat Portfolio in 1999 and since then has used the Print Studio to produce his own prints.