Susan Warner Keene

The work in ReVisions imagines language transformed into artifact through the act of writing. Informed by aspects of calligraphy, papermaking, and the history of the book, these pieces explore the visual and material presence of written language when fused with its paper support.

Fragments of historical text have been redrawn with liquid paper pulp in cursive script in arrangements suggested by their content, which includes lines and phrases from the Japanese poet Basho, the Chinese sage Lao Tzu, the American poet Emily Dickinson, and the French writer Edmond Jabès.

Writing can be seen as a particular kind of drawing that enables us to consider the visual possibilities of imaginative language, a process by which an insight can take on some of the characteristics of an object: solidity, texture, scale, colour. Robert Bringhurst has aptly described writing as the precipitate of language. It allows us to look again at words that, when spoken, exist in personal time and to move them into historical time, creating a looping link of thought through time. In these works I was curious to see what such residue might look like. Literally drawn from the page, the net-like structures slip in and out of legibility.

The intimacy of handwritten script connects the body to the capacity for abstract thought which language manifests. It is the relic of a past when the copying of texts by hand was a means of learning and celebrating as well as disseminating valued texts. In our era, electronic transmission is altering the way we generate, consume, and value written language. It seems timely to consider other uses for a page of text than information to be consumed as rapidly as possible.