Wordlessness, 2017 

Bedsheets, starch, thread, pins, newsprint paper.

This is part of a continued exploration on the nature of communication in artworks, focusing on how material qualities and chosen materials and treatments articulate meaning.

I used starched bed sheets to fashion envelopes, harnessing the poignancy of losing touch and also finding a way towards understanding. Formally, the envelopes create rhythms in wave-like patterns, echoing a distance between bodies, oceans away. The envelope, although anachronistic and virtually obsolete, can still be conceived to be a vehicle that physically surrounds and transports words, standing in for the body of the other, linking us to the remote tactile presence of the correspondent. The envelope is a proxy for the body with which one is engaged with in long distance communication. 

Disembodied communication is a sad fact, we rarely send letters now, implying a widening gulf separating us from each other. This piece evokes the nostalgia of that loss. Reading and interpreting visual, material and tactile qualities, and connecting them to the intentions and gestures of other bodies is what I believe allows us to make meaning from artworks. Should we continue to train ourselves in reading these traces? When this capacity is lost, what will happen to art?