Rebus, 2024

Hand-sawed copper with patina, 80cm x 100cm

Exhibited at Penrith Regional Gallery in Twelvefold, 2024

Finalist in the Jacaranda Acquisitive Drawing Award (JADA), Grafton Regional Gallery, 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.

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Photography: Maja Baska