Firstdraft, Woolloomooloo
6 December 2024 - 18 January 2025
Some Sort of Notation takes its name from the journals of Alexander Marshack: an archaeologist who, in 1964, published a study on seemingly random, human-made notches on palaeolithic bones. Adamant that the markings were far from meaningless, he proposed they were complex lunar observations— a proto-writing system. “It is clearly neither art nor decoration,” he’d said, “but some sort of notation.”
This project considers how modern language structures – such as grids, sequences, patterns and repetitions – create illusions of legibility, prompting misrecognitions of language where it mightn’t exist. By affecting how we differentiate between image and text, these structures confuse the transition between looking and reading, opening a space where poetic and erroneous correspondences can occur.
In this exhibition, several hundred oxidised metal ‘fragments’, which have been hand and laser-cut by the artist, are arranged in text-like configurations. These fragments assume the role of anomalous artefacts— relics of unknowable origins that are not bound to our current knowledge systems. A series of ballpoint pen drawings, referencing ancient inscriptions, indecipherable codes, and elaborate hoaxes, act as an estranged lexicon that might inform, or destabilise, possible readings of the fragments.
Weaving connections between the ancient artefactual and the science-fictional, this project continues investigations into the gaps and overlaps between drawing and writing. Some Sort of Notation is an invitation not to decipher, but to misread and to uncode: to pull apart, dismantle and unravel the language structures we rely on to resolve feelings of suspicion and duplicity. To draw conclusions, and doubt conclusions; to get lost and disoriented; and to linger in a space where meaning can be glimpsed or sensed, but never fully grasped.
Airspace Projects, Marrickville
Luna Studio, Newtown
2024
Abstract marks, like undeciphered writing systems, seem charged with the potential for meaning; but this meaning is dormant, illegible, and inaccessible. Cyphers is an installation that considers language as something that requires human interaction, and a community of people using the language, in order to keep it alive— or bring it to life.
Exhibited across multiple iterations, this work combines paper-cutting, ballpoint pen drawing, and hand-sawed copper to create a hypothetical encounter with a fictional, indecipherable script. By inviting audiences to use speculative copper cyphers to decode a series of paper-cut drawings, Cyphers explores the communicative potential of abstract marks when they are framed - or misread - as carriers of hidden meaning. The work prompts consideration into the moment a drawing transitions into writing, and asks whether collaborative efforts to decipher, decode, and misread meaningless marks can contribute to the illusion of legibility.
Penrith Regional Gallery, Emu Plains
2024
In the Book of Thoth, the-one-who-loves-knowledge asks: ‘What is writing? What are its places of storage?’
Rebus is a copper drawing installation that emerges from two simultaneous residencies: one in Cairo, Egypt; and one at Penrith Regional Gallery. Inquiring into the relationship between abstraction and meaning, the work takes the form of hieroglyphs, graffiti and marks found in ancient Egyptian sites that have been abstracted by thousands of years of disuse, misuse, vandalism and fragmentation. Their meanings, perhaps once legible, are now obscure and elusive.
Rebus draws its title from a puzzle game, where images and letters combine to form a word or phrase when spoken aloud. By re-contextualising both meaningless and meaningful marks, the work questions if these ancient signs retain their long forgotten and disrupted meanings, or if they generate new meanings entirely. Constructed through a slow, traditional method of hand-sawing copper that was learned while on residency in Egypt, Rebus invites drawing and writing to operate interchangeably, and an artwork to behave as an artefact. The work takes leave from modernist approaches to abstraction, and considers the possibility that a sign, symbol or letter might fail to fulfil its linguistic purpose. Instead, the drawings remain part of an indecipherable riddle; hinting towards ancient worlds, and questioning the stability of written language.
UNSW Galleries
2022
adversaria: noun plural / singular or plural in construction
1: commentaries or notes (as in a text or document)
2: a miscellaneous collection of notes, remarks, or selections: commonplace book
Ruminating on the ambiguous space between a mark and its meaning, Adversaria engages with an expanded drawing practice as an intermediary between word and image. The relationship between line, language and legibility emerges through a process of deconstruction and repetition, and the presence of language as a beholder of knowledge is called to question.
As the primary work in the series, Lineweight consists of four-hundred and twenty-five string figures hung individually in a grid, reminiscent of text on a page. The work considers individual preconceptions and peripheral knowledge of language and systems, and how they dictate the legibility of abstract forms. In this sense, the presence of a system appears to infer meaning, irregardless of its inherent meaninglessness.