I was commissioned to respond to an exhibition held at St.Mary’s Office Space, Norwich, curated by Jade Anderson entitled, ‘Mind.Language.Matter‘ which included work by:-
James Kessell
Jim Brown
Madalina Zaharia
Liz Collini
Rowan Lear
Stephen Dutton
The Drawing Shed.
My first visit to the exhibition was dominated by the visual froth of Lager and the remote acoustic tapping of old typewriter keys from a room I’d yet to enter. I immediately connected with physical space the art-work occupied. Within this, the way that Madalina Zahira’s art sought expression beyond the notion of a physical frame. Crop lines were let loose to make their own statements of physicality. I found myself studying the fabric of the building, the transient nature if it’s use over time, its irregular layout and bundles of wires and pipes which punctured walls to move through the thin partition between rooms. The strange dry air of the former office interior. The interruption to view of the vertical blinds and beyond the old St. Mary’s building where I worked at a Printers for a time. The dart of gulls circling the sky making crop lines of their own.
I was reminded of the glutinous sticky of printer’s ink, the sound of it loaded on the spatula as it was applied to the machinery. The physical loading of huge reams of paper. The perpetual roll of a long print run and the smell of drying ink. The transformation of white folios into signatures of rich glossy colour; halves, quarters and eighths. Making paper into message: statement. Endorsement. Information. Layouts with excess bleed touching the edge of the page. The crop allowance which indicates to the blades of the guillotine where to make the cut with absolute precision. Knocking up sheets. Feathering them. Wafting each leaf into order. Compliance. The butting up of paper to the Finisher’s rule. The neat crisp smooth fold. To crease. A score along the edge. Becomes the spine. Repetition. Repetition.
Stephen Dutton’s phrase ‘feel something inside my head’, ‘from ‘Studio Behaviour’ struck me as a such a potent phrase in reference to the artist’s creative process, read to the incessant backdrop of tapping typewriters. A sound which indicated the flow of thought. It was the old Imperial which drew me most; it’s shape, solidity. Its gravity. Like the Grandfather.
I began to wonder what is it that so appeals to us still about this old machinery as way of expression, mark-making, code-making. Is it pure nostalgia? We still have a physical connection with a keyboard. We punch keys in much the same way, use the same QUERTY layout. The metal prongs of keys, the relief of letters as they jab against the paper has a satisfying physicality. I wonder if the appeal is that we can see the mechanical process, making us feel more connected to the physical textual mode of expression. Still, there is no denying the seduction of light as a medium in computer screens, with words illuminated from behind by light emitting diodes or liquid crystal. I was intrigued by the reverse concept of the old Imperial loaded with a specially designed ultra violet ribbon, which needed light to shine on the surface of the paper to reveal the text.
The phrase ‘The Public Typing Pool’ (The Drawing Shed, Sally Labern and Bobby Lloyd) conjures all kinds of images; of something you dive into, submerge yourself in. Liquid. Fluid. But also a bringing together of function: to pool. To wallow. I also considered the typewriters physical text as one which could not easily be erased. Old type-writes have no backspace. On my second visit as I wrote in response to the art-work, the most marked difference was that the typing pool was empty. No one touched the keys. This made the space feel desolate. The type-writers looked lonely, lost, loaded as they were with paper which looked like the long curl of a tongue caught in the rollers. Waiting for touch. Connection. And without that touch it seemed there was nothing to say. I was reminded of the frustration and resistance to expression as I typed too quickly for the mechanics of the old Imperial, as the metal keys jammed in a cluster. Like they were tongue-tied.
And this brought to mind all the metonyms in language connected to tongues, such as tongue twister, tip of the tongue, tongue in cheek, slip of the tongue, the gift of tongues, speaking in tongues, forked tongue, sliver tongue, bite your tongue, cat got your tongue, mother tongue. This took be back to the poem I had written for British Art Show 8, ‘Vignettes Concerned with the Milky Stork,’ and the line which speaks of talking ‘in patois I understand, but is so unfamiliar,’ i.e. argot, dialect, vernacular, lingo, patter, cant. Language once removed from it’s relationship to meaning. Sound that only resembles speech patterns and language: glossolalia.
Communication and miscommunication which had surfaced as a fascination in this ‘Vignettes Concerned with the Milky Stork’ began to spill over. I began to contemplate that often what we say and what we mean are two different things. With the image in my mind the of the sheets of paper as tongues held between rollers, I began to wonder about what conversations the typewriters might have: conversations only activated by human touch. Sitting back to back as they were along the length of the typing pool in itself provoked the notion of restriction and latent ambition to converse. The type-writers were waiting for engagement to expound thought to physical and visual.
Certain elements of the mechanics of the type-writer became associated with the research I had undertaken recently in the writing of a short story about a sentient piano which feels and knows through vibration and touch. I can see that both the type-writer and piano are, of course, mechanical methods of expression reliant on physical human interaction. The use of fingers and the ordering of fingers to expound expression. The ribbon of the type-writer runs like a thread through the sentences, enabling thought and expression to run on and on as ‘language is materialised’ (Anderson, 2017).
Carrie Patten © 2017
Carrie Patten 