articulated subtext conceptual diagram, 2016

I love letters, text, symbols and numbers.

I love their graphic precision, their associations, their architectural possibility of structure and collapse, their endless capacity to be reinvented and reassembled in both poetic and nonsensical ways. And when lifted from the page, made animate, they easily slink together in watery ways. In my works, I keep returning to three-dimensional, ordering and disordering text as an apt metaphor for our media overloaded contemporary times.

Rather than choosing to create a literal representation of water, this project focussed on a more interpretative and dynamic understanding of what “water” and “fluidity” and “swimming” and “buoyancy” might mean. The piece presents a “watery” experience. This project demonstrates how we might understand the continuous and cyclical dynamic of fluids as being analogous to language, thoughts, memories. In the same way that one swims through a body of water, each of us is, consciously or not, always swimming through a fluid stream of memories of the past and thoughts of the future. 

The privacy that is necessarily provided to the viewer by the virtual-reality goggles is paralleled with the private way in which each of us is left cycling/swimming through our memories on our own – no one can join us in this swim! The apparent nonsense jumble of the text that the viewer swims through seeks to playfully remind the viewer of not worrying too much about “sensical” memories, since they too are constantly ebbing, flowing, changing….