Through my work I investigate language, exploring its relations to art to create a space for thinking of new models of perception and understanding. I work across a range of media, focusing on ideas generated from text(s), spoken word and linguistics through sculpture, installation, collage, sound and drawing. I am interested in exploring the relationship and interconnectedness of thought and language, say for example how we might understand how a sign operates in relation to a signifier through signification. And how this is susceptible to change through time and different cultural understandings or usage. Across the work I make I seek to express language’s materiality, taking a sculptural approach to reduce language to elements, systems and structures of signs, be it the arborescent schema of a sentence structure (in the mobile piece in colourless green ideas sleep furiously, which I will discuss briefly later), or the grapheme, phoneme and morpheme of writing, speech and language respectively (in the works GRAPHEME 2008, and A conversation between an artist and a linguist, 2010). Taking the idea of the materiality further, I often introduce elements of automation, movement, repetition and/or randomisation into the work, creating a playful exploration of the limits and finitudes of such schema or systems of meaning. I am specifically interested in the viewers perception of these ‘randomised systems’ particular in case to language; in which, the point where meaning is construed or ‘created’ is always inter-subjective. (I would be listening to my own voice as I speak to you, even possibly hearing what I am saying for the first time...). In a 2 channel sound work (A conversation between an artist and a linguist) which replays a conversation between myself and a linguistic student which has been cut-up to short phrases, words and vocal sounds, replayed at random; the effect is an example of how listening is a creative act upon the materiality of sound; the listener automatically generates meaning for themselves.
A brief example of my work in regards to the above, is the mobile piece in the style of Alexander Calder, in my solo exhibition, colourless green ideas sleep furiously, SPACE, 2010. I was inspired to make this piece after seeing a linguistic diagram of a simple sentence: ‘the boy saw the girl’. A tree-like diagram structured the sentence into constituent parts and it struck me that if one were to animate the diagram – i.e. introduce movement within the constituent parts, between the ‘branches’, then it could possibly make the (romantic) literal turn-of-phrase ‘the girl saw the boy’. A simple chiasmus formed by material manipulation. I took this interest further and researched Linguistics and started working with Linguistic students from SOAS university. I came across an (in)famous phrase by Noam Chomsky about linguistic theory. I sought to apply his theory literally onto his own words, binding his ideas to play together both semantically and materially to explore meaning and the creativity of language.
My interest in language in relation to art has led to begin a more research-based practice drawing from modernity and the social and theoretical movements, (that inspired my early sculptural work) for the events and ideas that led to new developments in artistic practice and modern thought… Saussure’s legacy ran deep into the previous century with the ‘linguistic turn’ effecting how we understand number, logic, culture, myth and our own being-in-the-world. This regime is reaching its own limits but has pushed our understanding further. Cognitive and Neuro-sciences have revolutionised what it is to ‘understand’ understanding, phenomenological processes and the psyche, revolutions drawn from the mapping, naming and the structuralisation of these cognitive/neuro ‘systems’.
Now, in the 21st Century, fields of practice are expanding, opening up situations from the inside, to borrow a phrase from Ranciere. Representation is still the primary territory of art. Art renders inexistence visible, the sensual sensible (Badiou). Currently my work is moving towards investigating ontology through language and number – this has come about through a series of events and experiences – research into linguistic anthropology and cognitive perception, and, I think, for which, I am finding an outlet in the potentials of choreography to explore some of the ideas the research has brought me to. As I write this I am developing a new collaborative project with an anthropologist, choreographer and a mathematician.
