alphabeater

hairy prints and wiry drawings exploring language and all its tangles

Opening Thursday 8 October 2009 @ 6pm. All Welcome.
Guest speaker Roland Manderson, Senior Advsior ACT Greens
Exhibition continues until Saturday 17 October

Nicci Haynes’s exhibition Alphabeater (Megalo Print Studio and Gallery, 6–17 October) is an assembly of hairy prints, wiry drawings and mechanical gadgetry inspired by the peculiar language of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.

In some of these works Joyce's text appears in ways that mirror its idiosyncrasy and indecipherability: in one piece text from Finnegans Wake  punched into paper is so fragile that it seems to be in the process of disintegration; in another the text is so densely overlaid that single words are no longer recognisable. 

In other works the idea of text is abstracted into grid structures that are variously disrupted: a grid of steel filaments so fine it is barely visible: fragile hairs interrupt surfaces; a tangled, chaotic weaving scarcely attaches to its supporting structure; a delicate net woven from hairs blends into the supporting wall.

Background sound is provided by a punched paper strip playing though a musical gadget: a translation of James Joyce reading from Finnegans Wake –  a reading barely recognisable as Irish-English translated into something differently unrecognisable by rendering Joyce’s voice to pianola roll style holes corresponding to musical notes.

In these pieces the capacity of language to order and control the chaotic disparate material of human life leans, like Finnegans Wake, towards disorder and disintegration.