Text on letters

I may have gone a little meta with this one. Text within text. What would the big text say? Who knows at the moment. What would the little text say? Well, at the moment I am very much stuck on continuous lines but that might all change. 

With the Rowhedge Art Trailing coming up later this year I want to think about large-scale text for an outside exhibition context. These text-on-letter tests might be the start of something. Though I am not sure the cardboard would cut it - they certainly wouldn't survive rain. 

I am also weighing up the natural colourings of the materials v's painted. The white on brown is growing on me and I am thinking that I'd achieve a similar aesthetic with MDF or similar - something that might survive the British summertime a little better than cardboard. However, I have played with white-on-black letters. A nod to the usual black-on-white text we are so accustomed to. 

The contrast is clearly more striking here, but I am not sure striking is what I am going for. I prefer understated. I also feel the white on black becomes a little too decorative, and the text is lost. I struggle to read the words here, despite being the one who wrote them. 

There is also something to say here about the amount of text each letter might hold. At the moment I am drawn to the less is more. I think I am persuading myself to go for something more readable, and less busy. I'm just not too sure what I want to say yet. 

Something about cardboard

Wandering around my studio with a white paint pen. I was looking for something, anything, to write something, anything, on. After playing with paper I moved onto cardboard. Cardboard often finds its way into my artwork due to its DIY properties. With the cardboard, I wanted to explore larger-scale works and text that could creep around the edges.

The continuous lines talked about in this blog post remain. The writing ended when I felt that continuous thought had come to a natural end. The text on the box intends to be the focal point of the piece. The writing is legible and simply rendered by hand, there are no special effects or embellishments. The outcomes are clean and uncluttered and are intended to be shown as a collection. 

Continuous lines continue

This post begins with my linguistic epiphany that lines could mean lines of text, not just line drawings. I enjoy bending language and this helps me situate the technique in my art practice more fully. 

I've moved this practice to the digital as I wanted to reengage with my drawing tablet, it has been neglected since I stopped drawing road signs some time ago. Working digitally felt more restricted and working became more careful. It also became much more evident when the pen was lifted from the tablet, making adhering to the rules of a continuous line even more important. 

Spacing became more difficult to judge as the size of the tablet was not reflective of the screen, resulting in 'page' almost falling off the page. I've started basic and avoided writing around corners, but that is the aim. I like the performative nature of the text that becomes on the side and then upside down. 

Time

Time is an automatic writing collection, written on the brown paper you get inside rolls of wrapping paper, in pencil with my non-dominant hand, and then painted with black acrylic paint. This collection started around a year ago and was originally intended to be part of a collaborative research project on time and liminal spaces. The collaboration did not come to anything, but my writing on time continued. 

The liminal spaces as places to exhibit the work fell away, by automatic writing stayed - a practice that I have ended with over the last decade. 

There is no end point penciled in for this collection. It will come to a natural end, and then be exhibited. Each piece is slightly different in length and width, depending on the role of wrapping paper the brown paper came from. The works are likely to be exhibited as wall hangings and will remain unframed. 

Due to the nature of the work, I have little knowledge of what words have emerged in the writing process, other than the starting prompt was the topic of time. I do not read the words once the writing is completed, and when tracing the lines of the letters in acrylic paint I see the words as abstract shapes - often unable to read what the word says. This process protects the work, as I am sure if viewed with a critical eye I would keep the work hidden.