An exhibition of work by artists who use text as an integral part of their creative process. From assemblage to sloganism, narratives written within the image or words and their component parts in play, this collection of artwork explores some of the ways in which artists incorporate words in visual artworks.
Ever since the cubists collaged newspaper, labels and ticket stubs into their still life paintings at the turn of the 20th century artists have used ‘found’ printed letters into their work. Adding visual interest, texture and a sense of the present in the everyday timestamp of the centuries technological revolution.
Words are ubiquitous in our lives, reading the streams of online texts, advertising, packing, signs or even the intimate words in a novel or poem most of us forget each letter is a shape and each word its own composition. Using language, artists transform the basic building blocks of contemporary communication, using the alphabet as a tool to create unique provocations.
Language is uniquely malleable and constantly reinvented. Just as artists find new ways to manipulate paint or clay, so too do they find new ways of transforming words into art; pairing words with images, playing with the meaning of words, annotating, redacting, creating comic interjections reducing to the component parts a letter at a time.
By blending visual, physical, literary, and poetic elements, these artworks create a rich, interdisciplinary experience that broadens the scope of traditional art forms and expectations.
Peter Blake, Britain’s godfather of pop, mines the iconography of the past searching out new icons and meaning in the present. From his Dazzle Alphabet Series, to the collaged Americana of his USA series Blake creates a new pop art which stems directly from our time.
Tom Phillips uses a ‘found’ narrative as the starting point for many of his prints. Working directly onto the pages of printed books, isolating phrases or parts of words and then combining these with paint and collage elements to form a new verbal and visual narrative.
Bruce McLean is a humorous wordsmith who incorporates words and even paper slips into his paintings and prints, lists of chores, food or titles that humorously jostle with his images of the everyday.
Emma Talbot draws on her own autobiography to negotiate the twentieth and twenty–first century struggle of the individual in life, in the family, at home and in society. Memories, thoughts, and fantasies are woven tightly into her distinct visual vocabulary. Inspired by 1930's fonts, Japanese Shunga, metaphysical poetry, film noir, Edgar Reitz's Heimat, Edith Piaf, Edna O'Brien, Jacques Brel, Kurt Weill, Marlene Dietrich, Anaïs Nin, Pablo Neruda, and Paul Ricœur, the artist has developed an imaginative visual language all her own.
Lindsay Rutter embraces the alchemy of ceramics, combining clay with printing techniques to create 3D works that are a uniquely raw commentary on her lived reality and the irrationalities of 21st-century society. Scribing, stamping and cutting directly into clay her words are a stream of consciousness in the moment.
Kay Le Seelleur Ara is well known for her use of words in relation to her painted or cartoon images, in the sometimes crazy long titles or the graffiti-like intrusion of words into the paintings themselves or their frames. In 2024 artist and writer Shirley MacWilliam wrote The Importance of Being Titled, a deep dive into the titles that accompany Kay’s paintings.
Mark Medland is a filmmaker, illustrator, model maker, architect, and collage artist who uses repurposed images and found objects, that he collects as he walks around Jersey and from his travels further afield. Accompanied by highly researched written proposals or speculative fictions his imaginary worlds come to life filled with humour and invention and are populated by characters that charm, surprise and entertain.
