WordPower: Language as Medium - available now

WordPower: Language as Medium, the publication that my work features in, is available now, online and in print through the following channels:

Direct: Our short print run of 100 copies have almost sold out. Available at £20 + P&P (Postage only available to UK mainland, USA, Canada, Australia and some parts of Europe - delivery can take up to 10 days)

Amazon: BOOK I and BOOK II (can post to any worldwide destination in 48 hours) Note: This is a general release edition - no poster artwork included

View online: BOOK I and BOOK II

Joseph Grigely

I was recently introduced to the work of Joseph Grigely, an American artist who works in a range of media including sculpture, video and installation. When Grigely was ten he was involved in an accident and he became profoundly deaf. He has since used this to fuel his artistic practice, commenting that he “want[s] to take people inside the experience of being deaf and share it with them.”




St. Cecilia 2007, paper

Grigely regularly communicates with other people by writing on scraps of paper and napkins. He collects these records of his daily conversations, and organises them according to different systems such as their size or colour.




167 White Conversations 2004
© Joseph Grigely

"When people who do not know sign language talk with me, I explain that I am deaf and ask them to write – a mode of communication that is simple without being simplistic, and generally inclusive. But what gets written is often quite unlike writing in the usual sense: there are gaps, crossed-out words, drawing, lines, all of which looks less like writing that it does talking on paper. It is by using these scraps of paper on which people have written notes, names, or phrases in order to 'converse' with me that I make much of my art, using such scraps of conversations to make wall pieces, books, and table-top tableaux that all take as their subject matter the ineluctable differences between speech and writing, and reading and listening."



The Information Economy, 1996, mixed media


https://www.artsy.net/artist/joseph-grigely

https://www.wnewhouseawards.com/josephgrigely.html

https://scpt209.wordpress.com/2012/10/22/joseph-grigely/

The Joy of Text on BBC Radio 4

Artist and broadcaster Bob and Roberta Smith, famed for his hand-painted slogans, goes on a personal journey to explore how text and language are used in art. 

From monks in Cistercian Abbeys and medieval bureaucrats, to conceptual art subversives challenging who could be considered artists, Bob and Roberta Smith draws on a wide range of traditions. He also re-examines his own formative experiences with the interplay of words, colour and form to bring listeners into the present. 

Tom Phillips

Over the course of the programme, we're led on an emotional trip through a world of cut up Victorian novellas - and we encounter pop-art printing making nuns working at the coal face of the civil rights. Bob and Roberta Smith meets political cartoonists creating new languages, artists fusing text and images to give voices to the marginalised, and a group of women democratising art through text, images and a Risograph printing machine. 

Corita Kent

This programme reveals that - away from plays, novels or song lyrics - text and language have been adopted by artists in contrasting and ever-evolving ways, but these all reveal that text is an art form in itself. Featuring Steve Bell, Corita Kent, Janette Parris, Tom Phillips, Donna Steele and Sofia Niazi.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0bkqv3x

Alphabets of life

Following one of my recent blog posts, a friend contacted me with a suggestion to look at the book, Alphabets of Life by Kim H. Veltman. The book is about origins of alphabet and stories of the skies. Kim H. Veltman explores the origins of alphabets and characters in terms of five world languages. A theme of the book is to show that alphabet letters, now considered abstract signs, began as cosmograms and elements to explain stories of the skies, creation and life.

Ancient Armenian Alphabets (c. 6,500 B.C.) 

'It begins with an examination of marks, signs and symbols associated with the first three stages of writing.In Russia, these include Slavic petrogylphs, tamgas, glyphs, runes. They marked eternal cycles, primal forces and key moments of the annual cycle: solstices and equinoxes. Some of these became letters. Often parts or subsets became letters. They also became linked with early calendars.

Ancient Chechen Alphabets (c. 4,500 B.C.)

Sanskrit is the first documented, systematic approach linking sounds in the mouth with letters. It introduced eight divisions of the alphabet, and matrices of letters. Letters are linked with principles and elements in nature (tattvas). Letters are also linked with energy points in the body (chakras), with the mansions (nakshatras) of the moon and zodiac signs (rasis) of the sun. This approach becomes a starting point for chakra figures, temples, sacred cities and sacred landscapes. 

Ancient Slavic runes

Sanskrit is much more than a simple ordering of letters and sounds that we write, read, speak and hear: it provides a system for bringing order to the cosmos. The author explains how this integration involves breathing and yoga, which become an important factor in the structuring of early alphabets.

Slavic, Georgian, Armenian, Arabic, Mauritanian and Tibetan runes, letters

Scandinavian runes are linked with movements of the human body in a form of runic yoga that has roots in Bulgaria, Turkey and the Russian Federation. Scandivanian runes typically use 9 sticks or glory twigs in a relatively informal system. Slavic runes are inspired by a series of matrices and grids, which become models for runes and alphabets.

Slavic, Georgian, Armenian, Arabic, Mauritanian and Tibetan runes, letters

Early cultures typically linked letters of the alphabet with their astronomy and cosmology: e.g. stars, constellations, zodiac signs (of the sun), mansions (of the moon), planets. These arrangements are linked with stories of the skies.'

Slavic, Georgian, Armenian, Arabic, Mauritanian and Tibetan runes, letters

For more information, please visit http://www.alphabetsoflife.com