Para•dox (2019-present)
If drawing is defined as mark-making, then writing is drawing.
Language, as an open system, shapes the speaker while consistently evolving despite the speaker.
In our computer-mediated digital age, materiality must be situated as distinct from physicality.
My material is language; my physical media are encaustic and paper. These works begin by my drawing text rooted in my experience as a queer woman in America. I approach the page in terms of proportional concerns rather than solely ideas of handwriting, studying each letter as line, shape, and form, and then I layer this drawn text into palimpsests which simultaneously reinforce and fragment the root/meaning of the language. At the fore of this process is my attempt to engage with the ways in which language uniquely serves as a simultaneous metaphor for both the individual and the systems at play within a given culture (here, American). Any language evolves alongside a culture, a milieu, a hegemony, a community, a locality. As the living, breathing, material entity that it is, that language then has a hand in shaping the mind of its speaker.
Within these attempts to examine text as image, my layers establish pictorial depth which denies the idea of structured verbal meaning, but which subsequently – inevitably – brings about emotion through the combination of visual cues. This reveals the paradox of the uniquely complicated text and image relationship: in order to establish the separation from (or nonexistence of) a word’s meaning, one inevitably first states what its existence/meaning is. This series is not one of concrete poetry, nor ekphrasis, and it is not solely a painting; rather the work oscillates between and among all of these at once, leaving the viewers to grapple with their relationship to language.
If drawing is defined as mark-making, then writing is drawing.
Language, as an open system, shapes the speaker while consistently evolving despite the speaker.
In our computer-mediated digital age, materiality must be situated as distinct from physicality.
My material is language; my physical media are encaustic and paper. These works begin by my drawing text rooted in my experience as a queer woman in America. I approach the page in terms of proportional concerns rather than solely ideas of handwriting, studying each letter as line, shape, and form, and then I layer this drawn text into palimpsests which simultaneously reinforce and fragment the root/meaning of the language. At the fore of this process is my attempt to engage with the ways in which language uniquely serves as a simultaneous metaphor for both the individual and the systems at play within a given culture (here, American). Any language evolves alongside a culture, a milieu, a hegemony, a community, a locality. As the living, breathing, material entity that it is, that language then has a hand in shaping the mind of its speaker.
Within these attempts to examine text as image, my layers establish pictorial depth which denies the idea of structured verbal meaning, but which subsequently – inevitably – brings about emotion through the combination of visual cues. This reveals the paradox of the uniquely complicated text and image relationship: in order to establish the separation from (or nonexistence of) a word’s meaning, one inevitably first states what its existence/meaning is. This series is not one of concrete poetry, nor ekphrasis, and it is not solely a painting; rather the work oscillates between and among all of these at once, leaving the viewers to grapple with their relationship to language.
All Images and Text unless otherwise noted © copyright Dawn Kramlich
