Pamela Dodds
VISUAL ARTIST
Chronique Analytique / Analytic Chronicle
a collaborative work with francophone artist Diane Fournier
2012
An Abecedarium
A bilingual, cross-cultural exploration of language.
Serigraphy with sculptural box
Une abecedaire
Une exploration bilingue et interculturelle du langue
Serigraphie avec une boîte à la main
Paired as a part of a cross-cultural exchange, Diane and I were challenged by our limited knowledge of each others’ language at that time. We constantly referred to our pocket dictionaries to communicate as we planned our project. And through this we found that the process of communicating across language was our subject.
Each letter in Chronique Analytique / Analytic Chronicle is represented by a French-English cognate – a word of same or similar spelling and meaning. But, as it is with cognates, meaning and usage are not always exactly the same. To explore the role of culture and personal experience in language, we chose nouns for concepts, qualities, and states of being, not things. Then, we each separately drew images in response to the chosen words in a spontaneous, stream-of-consciousness manner. Later, we combined the images through serigraphy – Diane’s loose abstractions, most, but not all, printed in colour, together with my line drawings, including hands, eyes and figures, most, but not all, printed in black. The result is alphabetical visual representation of 26 letters.