Word Series 2016 – 2018
13” x 19” printed text including handwriting and photographs on matt and semi-gloss ink jet paper
The Word Series is something totally new for me, unlike most of the artwork I have ever done. Following are some of the inspirations for this new work.
I have always been interested in “concrete poetry”, a form in which text creates shapes or images that may or may not have anything to do with the content or information in the text. There are very modern as well as very ancient examples of this kind of art including its application in architecture.
I can only use Microsoft Word in the most basic or analog approach to the system, but I wanted to use it as a design and creative tool to make my own concrete poetry. I began learning my way around Word as I made these pieces. I worked with my own written material, that of friends and copy taken directly from Wikipedia, copied and pasted for raw texture as well as content. I worked with numbers as well as letters.
To create the desired results, I selected typefaces, made them large or small, changed their color and organized them on a page, often measuring things with a ruler placed on the computer screen. I searched my photo archives for images that I wanted to manipulate and combine with text. Occasionally, the pieces become three dimensional as I layered text and images over one another or shaped the paper itself to strengthen an idea. In some of the pieces I have over printed images and text up to 20 separate layers. With these few procedures the possibilities are endless.
