Drawing beside the lines of writing: Letters to Anni

Morfill, Sally ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2654-9467 (2023) Drawing beside the lines of writing: Letters to Anni. Journal of Visual Art Practice, 22 (2-3). pp. 245-272. ISSN 1470-2029

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Abstract

This article presents a sequence of drawings belonging to the wider project Letters to Anni (2022-). At the centre of the project is an event of writing: the habitual gesture of handwriting--in this instance, in the context of a longhand letter to Anni Albers--recorded using motion sensors. A sequence of translation processes applied to the captured digital data allows the usually ephemeral movement of points on the hand to be registered as linear compositions. The interspersed text ruminates on inscribed line as expression of thought, and mediator between language and movement. It draws together a constellation of reference points, including the personal experience of learning to write, Vilém Flusser’s ‘Gesture of Writing’, and Albers’s interest in visual forms of writing that influenced her figurative weavings, and which inspired the project. A context for the work unfolds; the drawings, characterised by a writing aesthetic that is read as image rather than text, are positioned as a kind of ‘para-writing’, made in the moment of inscribing meaning, they are drawings located beside the lines of writing.