the materiality of text, from Siún.

Cathy, Clare (and interested Triptychers…)

Are you interested in continuing our conversations? Not a formal collaboration but an exploratory conversation…

My art practice is a form of writing… writing that, in some ways, doesn’t properly belong anywhere. It is not visual art, although its visual and thingly qualities are important to me. It is not philosophy although its concerns fall into that domain. It is not poetry, although its concern for language has something of this in it (I hope). The Greek root of poetry, poesis, which means making, offers a descriptor: it is poesis, a making.

My concern with typography and the physical manifestation of the text emerges from an interest in the nature of meaning. A strength of art is that it reveals itself as a composition. Writing, in our culture, tends to erase its formation. In my work is an enquiry into meaning that seeks to reveal its own constructedness, to bring writing clsoer to the condition of art. Attending to the text, the form of the words, matters.

As you both know, I am not a typographer – I’m only a wee beginner… but I have read Bringhurst from cover to cover (apparently a good sign). I have a lot to learn from being in conversation with you… but what, if anything, do I have to give?