Continuing the exploration of spaces between words, I wondered how the spaces changed when the text was hand-written rather than typed. There is a precise rhythm to the spacing in typed words, of course, the text is even in size and the shapes vary not at all. Written work, on the other hand, offers much more space for variation, both intented and accidental via the process of ‘manuscipting’.

In this drawing, I wrote the text in wax, then added the blobs of wax to indicate the spaces between the words. The resulting rhythm of  blobs brings to mind a kind of  weird musical notation.

While working on the rose scribing, the text was, to a very large extent, the focus of the work. I’d often break words apart, or run them together.  Recently, I started to think more about how the text (any text) makes sense to the reader, how our accepted forms and modes of organization allow us to read the letters as words. The idea came while reading Jose Saramago’s The Elephant’s Tale. Saramago uses very little punctuation and capitalization, so that it is often difficult to know right off who is doing the speaking. Sentences run into each other and names are in small letters. Where do thoughts begin? Where do they end? Who is speaking?  Saramago makes the reader work at the reading. But at the same time, the flow and space that Saramago creates is similar to how we speak.  So, the question for these drawings was, “What would a text look like if there were no text, but only the spaces?”

The drawing is done in beeswax with a traditional egg-painting tool. The blue is powdered pastel, rubbed on and then wiped off.