Phenomenology of Image and Text....

detail of work in progress from the pages of Phenomenology of Image and Text...

Phenomenology of Image and Text  is the artist book that has been accepted into the Artspace Mackay Regional Gallery 'Libris Awards'...as with most books I rely on the bringing together of disparate elements that tend to delivery their own suggestions and evocations.I could add 'their own meaning' but it seems to me that they provide very little of any essential meaning. This is where I begin to sound somewhat repetitive in my explanations but essentially the poetic response avoids the embrace of one fixed response. The ambiguity of the relationship between alphabetical text, names of places, Brisbane suburbs and streets and the placement of repeated images of a male figure taken from an illustrated book on healthy breathing and exercise for men seems to me to be something that is difficult to pin down to one singular response apart from the overarching reference to the strangeness of the relationship between the naming of things and the object or the image it represents.

Of course the realm of semiotics delivers systematic ways of deciphering the relationship between the object or place and how language has been chosen to represent it...something I so consciously avoid. This may seem an odd thing but I like the experience of having what I make remain within a threshold of being unfamiliar...Phenomenology of Image and Text is an attempt to hold onto that sense of the unfamiliar.

1.detail of pages from Phenomenology of Image and Text...etching and photographic transfer.

2. detail of pages from Phenomenology of Image and Text

3. detail of pages from Phenomenology of Image and Text

4. detail of pages from Phenomenology of Image and Text

detail of work in progress from  the pages of Phenomenology of Image and Text