Drawing Language

catalogue essay

written by Nina Stromqvist

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Drawn language, a genre I’ll play with for the purpose of this essay, might be said to sit within an expanded field that, much like the tenets of art writing, displaces traditional hierarchies in the knowledge that meaning is in constant flux. This genre, as so eloquently realised by the artist Tia Madden in Some Sort of Notation, succeeds in its expansion of both its forms. Challenging language as a meaning maker and as truthsayer, Madden’s carefully hand and laser cut metal fragments hover above the surface - play tricks on our perceptions, and fool us as we look for clues in their shadows. En masse the shadows are where fictions are played out, within that space between the certainty of the object and the authority of the wall - it is here where imagination takes us, back and forth, and in and out of meaning. 

With Madden’s language drawings, a strange picto-syllabic story unfolds, and the promise of legibility that is baked into us suggests a narrative arc. Yet these assemblages take on gestures that you might find hidden in the depths of a secret society meeting place, devoted to practicing the occult, metaphysics, or the paranormal. Wandering lines that vary in scale, and repeat with insistence - pauses of silence punctuated by gestural arcs. 

Madden tells me that she is drawn to repetition, “It carries a certain persistence, assertion or fixation, as with mantras, hypnoses, rhymes and incantations. But it’s also an undoing: when we repeat a word aloud, over and over, it seems to break down and become incoherent, like rubble on the tongue.”  The repetition of these abstract notations is strangely comforting to me however, like words on the tip of my tongue, I attempt to decipher the undecipherable. What truths lie in our understanding of sequences and repetitions? If something is repeated time and time again, then surely it must be true. 

The installation is paired with a series of ballpoint pen drawings of notations, texts and inscriptions that share in their inability to be deciphered. The series includes drawings of a transcription of Hélène Smith’s ‘Martian’ written communications from the late 19thC; the Voynich Manuscript from 15thC that many believe to be an elaborate hoax; Madden’s own collection of photographs taken while on residency in Egypt in 2023 – all containing indecipherable, unknown or damaged notations – and a segment of Charles Forster’s ‘The One Primeval Language’ hand-drawn spreadsheet from 1851, which collates numerous found ancient scripts into one large table. There is a drawing as well of the Vikramkhol Cave inscriptions - markings dated to c.1500 BCE, of which there are two theories regarding its inscription - one declares it a writing using the ancient writing system of Brahmi, while others doubt its authority as a written language at all. 

It is the effort to decipher and understand that is seized upon by Madden, and further abstracted by her ballpoint drawings of them - blurring the line between drawing and document, while disrupting ideas of history and place. 

Some Sort of Notation holds no answers, but asks of us many questions. What is the space between writer and artist, between the past and the present, and what stories and contexts do we bring to knowledge and meaning? Madden proposes engagement on a parallel plane, the repetition reveals encoded knowledge within us all, while erasing the comfortable assumptions we hold about histories as it weaves connections between the ancient artifact, forgotten languages, and the science-fictional. 

Despite Madden’s deconstruction of the written form, I search for meaning, an act that is familiar and from another time. There may be connections and stories within and between these notations but my attempts to read them are thwarted as these threads have all but faded with the rise of Western ideas of modernity and progress, which obfuscates rather than enlightens ways of being in the world. The attempt to read Some Sort of Notation however, offers us important clues - namely the narrow existence that our modern ideas of language frames for us, and the power and authority language holds over us in the attempt to define meaning. 

As I write this, I’m reminded of Jane Bennet’s curious thesis Vibrant Matter; a political ecology of things, where she suggests that all matter is empowered by an agency that takes its own form of ecology, beyond the human. Matter - from metal, to rust, to plastic and fire. I hear her question “but what if we loosened the tie between participation and human language use, encountering the world as a swarm of vibrant materials entering and leaving agentic assemblages?” 

Using Bennett as a guide now, Madden’s notations take me along their repetitive sequence, and hold my attention like words on a page, but leave me moving towards multiple possibilities. Like vibrant materials with their own story to tell, these fragments choose instead to appeal to our sense of rhythm and repetition, carrying us along their material curve or accent, abstracting our sense of understanding - offering new meanings. 

Rather than trying to read Madden’s drawing language, we might choose instead to become part of its rhythm, as if our very presence is part of its performance. The fragments, in their estranged lexicon and deliberate disjunction from conventional systems of understanding, invite instead a reading that is not about deciphering or recovering an original meaning, but about dwelling in the uncertainty and productive ambiguity that can be identified as intrinsic to language.

Nina Stromqvist, November 2024

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Notes:

1. Prusty, Subrat. (2019). Bikramkhol Inscription. Conference: Lipi Literature National Conference. At: Ravenshaw University, Cuttack, Odisha, India

2. Bennett, Jane, Vibrant Matter: a Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. political ecologies p 107w