'The visual impact of type is sometimes neglected, yet text is an eminently aesthetic form.'
Mallory Gemmel, writing for artshelp.net, 2021 Text appears in my drawings often... for a number of reasons, some of which I probably can't explain, but the most obvious is probably it's aesthetic form. That and the fact that a lot of the time its just there to draw. In my drawings I use newspaper images as my starting point, so I'm regularly looking at pictures with a physical text element from a story, selected by a photographer to streamline a newspaper's story-telling (it saves column inches). Sometimes it's a road-sign, sometimes it's a big cardboard cheque; on one happy occasion it was a home-made sign, instructing a concerned citizen's unknown neighbour neighbour to 'stop urinating in this alleyway'. The home-made 'urinating in the alleyway' sign was irresistable to me. It was presented to me (a newspaper reader), much the same as it was presented to its original intended reader: punchy, eyecatching and agressive. Much like the sign's original intended reader - the unknown alleyway urinator - the sign ultimately came across as trivial and humorous, for all its passive aggression and boldness. How could I not draw this and put it in a frame on a wall? Let's face it, the sign's intended reader probably pissed on the sign in the same spirit. That drawing itself was purchased by a collector in France several months ago, which led me to think about the impact of the written word on a viewer/reader reading a drawing in their second language. It is difficult to say whether humour translates in quite the same way (I hope it isn't lost), though text in art generally offers something thought provoking whether its message is obvious or not. 'What does that mean?' is one of the questions art gallery visitors around the world ask themselves when visiting a contemporary art gallery; this is why we so often run over to the supporting text at the side of an artwork, or clutch to a paper handout, when we visit the Tate Modern for the latest blockbuster. The written word in an artwork might tell us something (often it doesn't), but we are so often drawn to it, our minds inevitably trying to decode the wider artwork with whatever supporting information and tools we have available. I'm drawn to the aesthetics of the written word when I see it in photograph; its font, its meaning, its context. Text offers the starting point of a story and its context, a corner-cutting journalist's trusty companion, a perfect story-telling symbol, ripe for reframing and obscuring. |