drawing

I keep intending to get a website: in the meantime I’ll use this to store images of my own work. These images are from my exhibition, Alphabeater, at Megalo Print Studio and Gallery, 6–17 October 2009.

Photographs by Stuart Hay, ANU Photography.

These hairy prints, wiry drawings and mechanical gadgetry are inspired by the peculiar language of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.
Joycean text appears in ways that mirror its idiosyncrasy and indecipherability: in one piece text from Finnegans Wake punched into paper is so fragile that it seems to be in the process of disintegration; in another the text is so densely overlaid that single words are no longer recognisable. In other works the idea of text is abstracted into grid structures that are variously disrupted: a grid of steel filaments so fine it is barely visible: fragile hairs interrupt surfaces; a tangled, chaotic weaving scarcely attaches to its supporting structure; a delicate net woven from hairs blends into the supporting wall. Sound emanates from a musical gadget playing a pianola-style punched paper strip: a rendering into holes of James Joyce reading from Finnegans Wake.
In these pieces the capacity of language to order and control the chaotic disparate material of human life leans, like Finnegans Wake, towards disorder and disintegration.