A is for Aardvark 2021

22 x 15cm (closed)

Artist book (handmade paper bound with cotton thread), indeterminate number of pages

If a book has no pages, no words, is it still a book? Is it valuable, or is it useless? If a book cannot be read, cannot be understood, is it still a book?

This work explores the medium of the book and the use of signs and the signified in our instinctual need to read, comprehend and understand. Deconstructing and reconstructing the pulped pages of a used Macquarie dictionary, this work literally reduces the entirety of the English language to pages that simultaneously hold a plethora of and a total lack of meaning. With minimal text or symbols in the pages, the viewer is faced with a struggle to understand the contrasting absence and presence of this meaning, through the manipulation of printed text and image.

Both wordless and full of words at the same time, this work is aimed to surprise and challenge the viewer as they interact and try to read and understand reimagined conventions of printed symbols.