We are Lost

This exhibition, held at Megalo Print Studio and Gallery (Canberra) in October 2018, is experimental work in progress. Sitting within the overlaps of text art and visual poetry, these works are inspired by Matthew Kirchenbaum’s ideas on the materiality of digital media, where something that seems impenetrable and ‘lost’ can be painstakingly translated and reconstructed by forensic means.*

‘We are lost’ uses letterpress and screenprint processes to explore, shift and ‘lose’ visual readings of difficult texts. The source texts are words used to insult women, taken from an online lexicon of trolling language. These insults sink deep into the psyche despite constant advice to ‘brush them off’. Using printmaking to transform the words is a cathartic act of disruption. The drawing series uses abstraction to allow them to become playful. They seem impenetrable, but they use a system – the physical movements of hand-typesetting – and as such, their meanings can be restored, if desired, by giving them careful forensic attention. Or not: perhaps some things are better lost.

There are two streams of work: subverted letterpress, and abstracted drawings of words, using a gestural system based on the hand-setting of letterpress type.

All the work was produced during a short residency at the Centre for Fine Print Research at the University of West England (UWE) in Bristol, as part of Caren’s 2018 University of Canberra Donald Horne Creative and Cultural Fellowship. Grateful thanks to Sarah Bodman and Angie Butler of the UWE CFPR, and the UC Centre for Creative and Cultural Research (CCCR).

*Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, 2012. Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. US: MIT Press.