Art I like - Sylvia Ptak

Sylvia Ptak makes her faux-texts by pulling threads out from the background fabric and then applying colour.

For this image, from a 2008 exhibition called The Unicorn and The Date Palm, based on renaissance herbals, she has used heat-transfer to add the illustration after the "writing" is in place.

In a 2004 exhibition called Commentary at the University of Toronto’s Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library she slipped between the pages of a number of the library's rare books her own “pages” of abstracted, text-like shapes carefully woven into sheets of gauze; these pages were almost indistinguishable from the ancient pages of the real tomes.

Ptak says she is interested in “the multiple meanings that texts generate” - the incoprehensible language of her texts reads like everything and like nothing. "We have such faith in the printed - or handwritten - word that we feel it must be saying something," said the reviewer in the Globe and Mail; but to me, this writing is drawing, literally, in that a thread is drawn out of the fabric.

See a gallery of images from the exhibition here.