Artist's Statement

My current work consists largely of narrative in both text and imagery, presented in digital prints and artist's books. I create visual structures that determine very specifically the narrative I write for them, inspired by games, or by the rules of divination; in some cases, the structures dynamically generate the text themselves through computer applications. Often the text disappears into the work itself, which becomes entirely visual and only implicitly narrative. The story becomes visible, but unreadable; the works become objects of narrative play.

I am interested in generating static, old-media works, the process behind which are radically fluid. As an artist working with text, I have been most heavily influenced by avant-garde writers, especially those of the Oulipo movement, the Ouvroir des Littératures Potentielles (Workgroup for Potential Literatures). a group of writers who proposed to create new, highly defined structures within which to write, in order to force themselves to avoid all old habits and to find surprising new connections and possibilities in their own writing. In my work these structures have taken the form of computer programming, with which I determine the visual organization of the text and imagery that make up the work.

The narratives themselves derive from several sources. Stories are rooted in contemporary, daily experience, buy they often follow models from medieval literature, especially the then-popular encyclopedic books on natural phenomena. The allegorical construction of bestiaries, anatomies, and lapidaries, and the highly symbolic way in which their writers perceived the natural world, makes a conceptually rich structure within which to write, and the contrast with 21st-century digital technology makes an interesting counterpoint. This framework also allows me to explore the similarities between the illuminated manuscript, and the literally illuminated screen-based medium in which I create my own works. Both of these media, ancient and contemporary, bear rich and complex relationships between word as text and word as image; in each case meaning and affect are carried by the text in a multiplicity of interrelated, and sometimes contradictory, ways.

The works invite the viewer to "read" them in several different ways, both literally and figuratively, through the interpretation of metaphor and the interpretation of visual symbology. The level to which the text is abstracted—and thus the extent to which it remains legible—varies from project to project; by showing all these works in conjunction I hope to open questions about our visual relationship to language, to stories, and to the act of reading in daily life.