Glossolalia

Lumen & Logic

A page of writing in a language that does not exist, filling a warm off-white board edge to edge and running off all four sides. The alphabet is invented from the seed rather than authored: a grammar of bowls, posts, limbs and bars assembles a closed set of eight to a dozen vocables — a round O, a U, a V, an H, a bowl stopped by a post — and every one of the several hundred marks on the board is an instance of one of them, so the page reads as language rather than as pattern. It reads that way because of two levels of repetition: the vocables are drawn with a heavy frequency skew, so a few forms carry the whole panel and one or two appear twice in the entire picture, and the marks are grouped into short words from a lexicon that has its own skew, so clusters recur down the page and the same letter often doubles or triples immediately. Nothing is drawn twice from the same geometry — every instance passes through a fresh hand that gives it its own size, lean and aspect, a coarse three-swing tremor in place of true curvature, and its own stroke overrun and undershoot, so the bowl rarely closes and the crossbar overshoots one post and misses the other. The mark is a stubby loaded brush at a shallow constant angle: thick relative to the letter so counters close into blobs, mildly heavier on the strokes that run across the nib than along it, pooling where strokes meet inside a letter, and breaking into dry skips that show the board rather than fading to grey, because every value in the ink is a question of whether the brush touched down. Across the board a slow spatial field moves the weight and the wetness in patches several letters wide, unrelated to the rows, which is the only thing keeping an all-over field of one alphabet from reading as a printout. The board underneath is two or three sheets butted and taped, with a faint seam off centre and a slight tonal step across it. Two colours and no hue: near-black ink with a cool cast on a warm off-white support.

Medium

Generative algorithm, archival pigment print

Dimensions

60 × 90 cm