CAN LANGUAGE BOTH WRITTEN AND VISUAL, DEFINED AS VISUAL SYMBOLS ENGAGE THE DIVISION BETWEEN LITERATURE AND VISUAL ART?

 

 

 

My interest is the polarity of image and text as language. The recent MA I completed raise propositions in my practice, which developed from the action of reading a painting. This resulted in a body of work that engaged the visual (seeing) and the written (reading). These ideas evolve into new lines of enquiry. I am aware of the connection with the function of graphics in our culture of advertising, so too the popularity of mind games such as sudoku and word puzzles creating a relativity to my art. The connection is text, image and how we engage the two.

I make work in the media of print and paint, exploring this juxtaposition of languages, making paintings as symbols and text as a visual codex. I create my own series of symbols using drawn shapes and autonomous marks I edit these into alphabetic systems, which may or may not be codified or transcribed with our Latin alphabetic system. Recent prints have proposed excerpts of the written novel as visual artworks combining the visual and the literal art forms. From work done to date, I can identify points within my practice, which raises questions or points of inquiry which I hope to follow through in the proposed research.

    Can the visual image challenge the primary statuses of the written word?

    Can an artwork be both pictorial and linguistic?

    Within the context of text art, how do we understand  the relationship between       symbol and image?

    Do these artworks blur the definition of notation?

    Can the visual and the literal be negotiated within popular text based games?

    Is there a parallel between the visual and the linguistic in respect of the cliché,     anagrams and spelling/miss spelling ?

which ever method of presenting language is engaged i.e. typography, visual language, literature, calligraphy, graphic design, all use the visuality of text, so to address these issues within the boundaries of what is seen and what is read I believe will produce interesting outcomes that will bring an art makers perspective to the current debate.

My proposal is practice based and investigations into these questions would focus as such, engaging printing and painting. However I would also be interested in work involving audience participation. This could be in the form of choosing text or symbol, text games and vocabulary. Documentation of these event would be photographic and featured as blog documentation. The point of the practice based work would document how people engage and perceive text and image.