Writers’ Shift Drawings ︎︎︎
These drawings began with poetry and were made as part of ‘Writers' Shift’, a creative writing residency project at Fruitmarket, Edinburgh. They are visual responses to the works of poets Janette Ayachi, Callie Gardner, Jane Goldman, lain Morrison and Tom Pow, and weave fragments of their poetry with abstract symbols resembling the loops, waves and crosshatches of cursive handwriting. These illegible marks, generated by movements of the hand and accidents of ink, are traced and repeated many times over to form patterns held within loose structures of horizontal lines, like a page of writing.
I have an interest in the visual possibilities of written language, and these drawings particularly invoke a practice often referred to as asemic writing. This is an abstract visual form of writing or poetry, in which marks made bypass semantic meaning and instead resonates with our pre-conscious understanding of shape, rhythm and gesture.
Somnambulist Twists (2021) 42 x 60 cm
Ink and acrylic on paper
I Keep Giving Myself Away - Janette Ayachi
Ink and acrylic on paper
I Keep Giving Myself Away - Janette Ayachi
Pursuit (2021) 42 x 60 cm
Ink and acrylic on paper
The Fruit Market Extension - Tom Pow
Since Venice (2021) 42 x 60 cm
Ink and acrylic on paper
Ballad of the Creative Europe Desk UK in Time of Travail - Iain Morrison
Prematurely Fallen Fruits (2021) 42 x 60 cm
Ink and acrylic on paper
Rebirth - Tom Pow
Common Sunlight (2021) 42 x 60 cm
Ink and acrylic on paper
Here Too There Was Fruit - Jane Goldman
Ink and acrylic on paper
Here Too There Was Fruit - Jane Goldman
Assembled (2021) 42 x 60 cm
Ink and acrylic on paper
3. [3.1] - Callie Gardner