One activity of mine in making art involves making pieces with and / or from words, using the words as material or ‘stuff’. I am interested in draining the literal meaning from them and ‘turning’ them to another thing. A new situation is created, where the words themselves remain english but they dont quite hang together properly or entirely make sense. The results, whilst being sometimes inadvertently humorous, more importantly, often seem to me to have a poetic dimension also.
The piece ‘Marylène Quatre Fois’, a line of four framed A4 or A3 prints, makes use of the phenomenon of ‘machine translation’. Initially I ‘googled’ the French artist Marylène Negro to look at her work, and, without thinking used the ‘translate this page’ function on the french articles, reviews and publicity pieces. I used the translations just as they appeared in google but redesigned the graphic layout to give a consistent ‘look’ to the piece across the four panels.
The panels are each displayed here in two parts to enable legibility
Marylene Negro - the quest for seeland | Set of 4 framed A4 or A3 units | 2008 |
Marylene Negro - the collection, the album | ||
Marylene Negro - portrait | ||
Marylene Negro - frac des pays de la loire | ||
Titles left to right |