Pamela Dodds
VISUAL ARTIST

Chronique Analytique / Analytic Chronicle

a collaborative work with Québec printmaker Diane Fournier

2012

 

An Abecedary

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

 

Each letter is represented by a French and English word of same or similar meaning. Diane and I wanted to make imagery about experience, ideas, and perspectives, so we chose nouns for concepts, qualities, and states of being - not things. To create the work, we each separately drew images in response to the chosen words in a spontaneous, stream-of-consciousness manner and later 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 a single, layered, complex image to represent each word.

 

To contain the unbound pages, we built an ambiguously shaped box resembling perhaps, a brain, a cloud, or the amorphous shape of language itself.