These pieces explore the boundaries between drawing and writing, blurring them through repetition, copying and tracing. Many of the works experiment with the look of speed – fast or hasty mark making that suggest urgency, fluency or skill. As a child, I saw my grandmother’s household notes in stenography and I understood these as her private script. More recently, a friend gave me an old tutorial for Gregg shorthand stenography – a phonetic speed script. In it, the narrator explicitly states that shorthand is not drawing. Nevertheless, these layered images are drawings that reflect the process of gaining speed in stenography.

One of the shorthand drawings was shown in The Intuitionists at The Drawing Center, New York (2014) – another at the Contemporary Art from Cyprus exhibition at the European Central Bank in Frankfurt. They transcribe early 1980s hip hop lyrics into Gregg shorthand – putting together stenography, which was fading into disuse in the 1980s, together with hip-hop, which was gaining momentum. Both systems share qualities: speed, precision, personal style, and layered relationships to gender and power.

Further down on this page, the Perspex-based artworks explore repetition and copying as central themes. They were featured in Fusiform Gyrus, a 2013 exhibition at Lisson Gallery in London.