07 February 2012

"Stacked journalling" - and graphite

The "over-writing" technique I'm using has many possibilities - they are exhaustively set out in a tutorial here (thanks, Sandy, for pointing it out). It's fun fun fun - do have a go!

My over-writing project arose from journalling in two ways - from the crossing-out of old journals, and from the delight in making textures with handwriting, initially writing down my secret (and very boring) thoughts . Now my focus is on copying out plangent* texts - with a view to suiting the medium to them. I'm still at the stage of trying to define and refine my intention - and if I continue, I'll have to "explain" how this fits into my "everyday journeys" project.

*plangent (it felt like the right word but I had to look it up) = loud and resonating, often melancholy.

Another strand to this project is to be aware of subtle things and " meaningful accidents". For instance, using a fine pen that was running out of ink needed really hard pressure, and the paper underneath ended up covered with impressions - and the sheet of paper under that one still showed some marks - so before covering it with graphite, I used the defective pen to write another text, which bit deep into the paper. After 9B graphite was added and polished, it became reflective and almost readable -
On the other side, a light coat of graphite on the raised texture of the writing, and denser graphite around the edges to try to pick up the fainter marks of the ghost writing -
It looks like "nothing" - and in a way, it is...

2 comments:

Sandra Wyman said...

Fascinated by this post. Immense possibilities (I'm wondering about this - can possibilities be immense?) Maybe numerous!

Jane Housham said...

Those last two photos look very interesting and exciting to me. Perhaps you've just opened up a new path...