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. 

Continuous lines

It is the start of the year(ish) and with the start of the year comes the start of new courses! This means that in my teaching I am currently doing lots of drawing basics. One of my favorite drawing techniques to introduce at the start of a course is continuous line drawing - it is a little more relaxed and expectations are lower, all in all, it is usually quite fun. 

What this on my mind I find myself considering continuous lines, now I do not often draw in my practice so I jumped from continuous line drawing to continuous line writing quite quickly. 

I was waiting for the kettle to boil (hence the teapot and cup), and did not really have any words on my mind so decided to work with the words 'a continuous line drawing' as my prompt, the line (as all lines do) went for a walk around the page. I tackled corners and rotated paper all while being careful to not list my pen. I played with automatic writing to an extent with no words planned and returned to the word continuous when stuck.

I enjoy the aesthetics of the text and would not pair them with drawings going forward, as it was, the drawings existed before the text. This was ten minutes of play, that happily ended in an idea and a cup of tea. 

Cutting up art

The notion of cutting and sticking is nothing new and is something that I have previously explored using magazines. See these works here. However, recently I have ventured into new ground and started cutting up and sticking down my own artwork. 

I came to this process as I went through an intense period of creating gelli prints, leaving me with piles of outcomes that were works in progress and nothing more. I wanted to make sure of them and the text they held.

As the works were all my own there was the added benefit that any words were in my own font and that all outcomes were in the same colour pallets. Text is the same size as it is all created with the same stencil, meaning putting the words together was much easier than working with second-hand materials. 

The processes developed as I worked, initially I was cutting off words here and there and sticking them down, but as I moved on I decided to pre-cut all the old art, and create piles of words, singular letters, and areas of block colour. I am not sure if these will emerge as fully formed ideas, but at the moment I am enjoying the playing process. 

Now you see me...

This is a series of work in progress that draws on the fleetingness of language. The text is only visible at certain angles and disappears and reappears as you walk around it. 

The work consisted of framed wire mesh. The wire mesh has been printed on in a gelli printing process and the text has been added with the aid of a hand-cut paper stencil. The text itself is random to a degree and was chosen, or curated, to fit the space of the frame.

The one difficulty with the work is sourcing the same wire mesh as used here. The gaps in the mesh are large enough to help distort the image but not too small to provide a flat writing surface. The mesh is also fairly strong and was easily slotted into the frame. 

I do not usually frame artworks, but these outcomes required something that would hold them in place. The frames are deep and the work can be mirror-plated to a wall, or left free-standing, to be viewed more sculpturally. 

The frames themselves have been left untreated, and their glass frontage and backing removed. 

The readability of the text is dependent on the backdrop they are placed in front of. On a white wall, the words become easier to read, while in front of a busy backdrop, they disappear.