These works specifically overlap drawing and writing and blur the boundaries in between. Through repetition and copying (tracing), they are plays on authenticity and experiments with the look of speed. As a child, I saw my grandmother’s household notes in stenography which I understood as her private script. Her notes came to mind again after a friend gave me an old tutorial for Gregg shorthand – a phonetic speed script. In the book the tutor explicitly says that shorthand is not drawing, but these layered images are made from gaining speed in stenography.
What do they say? They are old school hip hop lyrics from the early 1980s, when stenography was going out of style and hip hop was on the rise. They had some things in common: speed, accuracy, personal style, and critical relationships to gender and power.
The works on Perspex selected here also deal with repetition and copying. They were for the exhibition, ’Fusiform Gyrus’ at Lisson Gallery, London 2013.
Ballpoint pen on multiple sheets of drafting paper, 37 x 18 cm 2015
Stenographic drawing from “White Lines” (Grand Master Flash / Melle Mel 1983 Sugar Hill)
Collection of the European Central Bank in Frankfurt
Graphite, carbon, ink on vintage blotter paper, Two folding scrolls: each 224 x 63 cm 2014
Stenographic drawing from “Beat Bop” (Rammelzee and K-Rob Tartown/Profile Records 1983)
created for “The Intuitionists” at the Drawing Center NY, 2014
Collection of the State Gallery of Contemporary Cypriot Art
stenographic drawing, “…like a gangster prankster number one bankster…”
Ballpoint pen on multiple sheets of drafting paper, 37 x 18 cm 2016
Stenographic drawing from “Rappers Delight” (The Sugar Hill Gang, 1980 Sugar Hill)
inscribed Perspex, 32 x 70 cm 2013 – Inscription reads, ‘psychopomp’
Exhibited in ‘Fusiform Gyrus’ at Lisson Gallery, London
Photo: Lisson Gallery London
Inscribed Perspex, 32 x 70 cm 2013 – Inscriptions include copied Medieval Cypriot graffiti
Exhibited in ‘Fusiform Gyrus’ at Lisson Gallery, London
Photo: Lisson Gallery, London.