Punctures

My two main "puncture" tools are the sewing machine and a tracing wheel, the sort with spikes. (Other puncture tools are lurking around the house, waiting to be found and tried.) These are particularly useful for making lines across paper ... and I'm using those lines as "text", playing with how it might communicate non-verbally.

One aspect of that communication is the "support" - the type of paper (or cloth?) that the line finds itself on. These are intended for experiments - stiff paper, graph paper, ordinary paper, tracing paper, patterned paper, all marked with punctured lines.

Rather boring as such! To take this forward we must consider other characteristics of lines:

spacing, density, "shape", flow, intersection, separateness, reflection, reticence, integrity, weight, conformity, individuality, timidity, boldness, visibility, randomness, intention ... there may be others ...

Art I like - Ann Hamilton

photo ©2011, Fredrik Marsh. All Rights Reserved

Raised lettering on the cork floor of the William Oxley Thompson Memorial Library, Ohio State University. It's a permanent installation called Verse and it's by installation artist Ann Hamilton. As it says here:

"The text is an alphabetic intersection of three different accountings of world history, which are arranged in a literary concordance. The spine along the north-south axis is composed of 299 words, A to Z, adapted from a White River Sioux story entitled The End of the World. The east-west lines intersect this story with prose fragments from A Little History of the World by E. H. Gombrich (1936) and Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone by Eduardo Galeano (2009).

"According to the library’s press release, Verse in its form and woven organization is a reflection of how the reader intersects with and culls information and meaning from the library’s collection."

The text is in the form of a mesostic (an invention of John Cage) - vertical phrases intersecting horizontal text.

Cork, though? - won't readers' feet wear down the raised letters, over time? Will that make pathways, desire lines...?

See more of Ann Hamilton's work here and on her website. Her 2009 installation human carriage at the Guggenheim sounds wonderful -

'Her formal description reads “Installation of cloth, wire, bells, books, string, pipe, pulleys, pages, cable, gravity, air, and sound,” and the Guggenheim Museum described its working thus: “Hamilton devises a mechanism that traverses the entire Guggenheim balustrade, taking the form of a white silk ‘bell carriage’ with Tibetan bells attached inside. As the cage spirals down along the balustrade, the purifying bells ring, awakening viewers. The mechanism is hoisted back up to a post at the uppermost Rotunda Level 6, where an attendant exchanges weights composed of thousands of cut-up books that counter the pulley system that propels the mechanism itself." '