Emily

I will here attempt to explain the leap that my brain took from my last project to this one: From my kitchen-becomes-alive movie I decided to go with the "objects taking on a personality" concept for my next project. From there my brain went through many obviously forgettable ideas of different ways that objects can start to have identity. Mostly in the beginning I was thinking of 3-dimensional objects, but then I realized that my personality is actually a part of my handwriting, which can be considered a "thing." At this point, I'm settled on using a collection of my handwriting. Now...what to write on? How to house the collection? Write all over a wall, write on objects, write in a book? What would I write? Thinking about what to write I realize that I want it to be about the mark-making--not about the words that the marks form. From this is born my random-lettering system. Also at this point I have decided to write in a book, although the format is still to be decided (perhaps the pages might come out of the book...we will see).

Random-lettering system explained: For each page of my book, there are 4 variables--the number of characters on the page, what those characters will be, with what I will write the characters, and whether or not I will be wearing one of my wrist braces, since it slightly alters my handwriting. These variables are decided my drawing slips of paper out of a bag (very technologically advanced, these things). The number bag contains two zeros, two ones, two twos, two threes, two fours, two fives, two sixes, two sevens, two eights, and two nines. For each page I choose two numbers out of the bag to get a number anywhere between 00 and 99. Then, depending on that number, I choose the characters out of another bad, which is filled according to the Scrabble letter distribution (you know, like 12 As, 9 Es, etc.) in order to be based on an English-language system, since that's my native language. I also put ;:.-- and some spaces in there. Then I choose from the material bag which ranges from highlighter to gold ink. Then I choose from the brace bag which has mostly no brace (since I'm usually not wearing it), a small brace, and 2 large braces (since I wear it more often than the small brace). Capish? Example: on the third page, I have 14 characters, which are as follows-- Ora ixalo yen. (the spaces and period count) which will be written in a 2B pencil while wearing my big brace. Other small rules I gave myself--no pages can begin with a symbol; all pages end in a symbol; all pages begin capitalized; after a symbol there must be a space; after a period the next letter must be capitalized. By the way, I know this is neurotic and obsessive--go with it.

So the first step...finding the appropriate book to gesso. I want to write in a gessoed book so you can see the contrasting printed word against my handwriting. I wanted an English book since my system is based off the English language. I wanted a relatively large-sized book, but not with so many pages that I couldn't fill them all. The fewer pictures, the better, since I don't want them to have too much influence on the piece. Preferably the topic of the book would have something to do with the kitchen/domestic sphere since that's been sort of a theme for me in this class. I found the perfect book.

Since then I've been gessoing like mad. I covered each page with one layer of gesso, drying before flipping the page so they don't stick together. After that round, I went back with white acrylic and further covered some of the images, while letting parts of them show through. This is where I am now, but my next step will be staining the pages with tea and/or coffee, so they're not so starkly white. Then I will begin the process of writing/drawing the letters according to my system. I already spent pretty much a whole day sitting with my random bags and recording what I will be writing on the pages, so I am fully ready to write-draw and actually really can't wait to start that process.

pictures of some of the gessoed pages: http://www.flickr.com/photos/23219926@N02/