Piles of letters

Inspired by the 'right place, right time' cardboard letters and the fun I had arranging them I thought I'd have a go at the same thing with the wooden letters.

I have started with the 6mm letters as they simply have better balance and can hold themselves up.

The letters are initially balanced and then glued - for convenience more than anything. But it is important that they balance on their own before I commit them to glue. I don't want to create a lie. 

Word selection was driven by the letters I had available, I started small and then I used the letters from each word and played with them to see how they would balance.

The order of the letters became unimportant in the quest for balance! However, this is fitting to my practice as I often work with breaking language and pushing its readability to its edges. 

For audiences, shorter words seem easier to work out than longer words, which is expected. But I enjoy the wrong guesses that the longer words bring. To create something that people engage with and try to work out is satisfying. It holds the audience in place.

There is potential here for shadow work too - I keep thinking about shadows and then not doing anything with it. 

Laser cut letters - Part 4

More letters and more sticks. This time I wanted to try out the thicker 6mm letters with sticks and had in mine puppet shows.

The sticks interact with these letters differently to the thinner letters. The sticks are around 4mm wide and this means they can fit onto the edge of the 6mm letters. 

I had an image in my head of a puppet show, but with letters. I liked the idea of them being able to move up and down - maybe in the movement new words and phrases should be made and unmade and remade.

This is kind of half an idea at the moment as I do not have as many 6mm letters (they took far larger to cut!). However, if I come to a solid idea I may go and cut some more.

They also kind of remind me of lollies. But I am not sure that is related to where this will end up. 

Cardboard Letters

My studio is an archive of letters and in moving things around I rediscovered a collection of cardboard letters. Made up of layers of cardboard stuck together with double-sided paint and painted in black acrylic paint, these letters had initially been created for a project involving magnets that I must have gotten distracted from. 

They spell out 'right time, right place' (a key phrase from my research) and were intended to be installed as a wall installation.

I took them outside and had a play with them. There are enough letters for them to be piled and stacked, and to lean up against each other.

While not the original intention I enjoyed this process. I was trying to get them all to stand up and for the letters to be readable for them to approximately be in the right order. However, readability wasn't too important.

I grouped the letters into their four words and left it at that. I had to work out how each stood, or how they needed to be supported. 

This has got me thinking about sculpture a bit more, and also shadow.  

Laser cut letters - Part 3

There is something about sticks at the moment in my art practice - simply because I am surrounded by them. 

The wooden letter/wooden stick combinations I shared recently were intended for outside, to stick into mud or the ground. However, once the wood glue had dried I started to see other possibilities too.

They started to look like something I could print with - so I gave it a go.

This worked well and I enjoy that with one dip of paint I could create multiple prints which each varied as the paint lessened. 

However, it was at that point that I realised, that while perfect for printing, the letters were the wrong way round (which is why they are perfect for printing!). But this means that they would not be the right way round for installation and the letters would appear back to front.

What a thing to realise after those days of gluing sticks to letters! I guess this just means I will have to do more printing with the existing stick letters, and more gluing of sticks onto more letters - this time the right way round - or the wrong way round - the opposite of whatever it was I did last time!