NAN GIESIE GALLERY//CDU//17.11.17
I Am a Text investigates the body as a site of inscription, projection, and reading. The work stages the self not as a stable origin of meaning, but as something produced through textual encounter: named, read, misread, cited, translated, and reconstituted through systems of address.
Developed through performance, video, installation, print, and the reappropriation of biblical material, the work asks where the body ends and the text begins. Its central declaration—“I am a text”—operates as both provocation and method, opening the body to the conditions of reading.
Documentation
Images/video/installation documentation.
Research Relation
Within the broader project, I Am a Text introduces the central proposition that textuality is not confined to written language. The body appears as both reader and read surface; both subject and substrate; both authorial presence and textual effect.
The work establishes many of the project’s ongoing concerns: text/flesh entanglement, biblical inscription, queer address, authorship, projection, and the instability of origins. It becomes a recurring point of return throughout Meeting the Text Halfway.
QR Relation
Section: Part II: Praxis
Chapter: I AM A TEXT
Page: 124
Return to the document: This page provides visual and moving-image documentation of the work discussed in Part II.
MARKET MARKET//DARWIN FESTIVAL//26.08.2023
This iteration of I Am a Text was developed for Market Market, an experimental arts lab and site-specific project situated within Darwin’s Rapid Creek Markets. The work was distributed through QR codes printed onto brown paper takeaway bags, linking market visitors to moving-image material and sound recordings from the market environment.
In this context, the text moved away from the gallery and entered a public, transactional, and everyday space. It circulated through hands, food, movement, bodies, and market exchange.
Documentation
Video/QR bag documentation/sound/project images.
Research Relation
This version extends the project’s interest in textual circulation. The work becomes less a fixed artwork than a distributed encounter: a text carried through public space, opened through a device, and activated by the reader/viewer’s movement.
It demonstrates how the project’s textual surfaces are not limited to the page, screen, or gallery wall. A takeaway bag, a QR code, a market, and a mobile phone all become surfaces of inscription and reception.
QR Relation
Section: Part II: Praxis
Chapter: I AM A TEXT / Market Market
Page: 124
Return to the document: This page documents the public and distributed iteration of I Am a Text discussed in the exegesis.
STUDIO EXPLORATION//2024
I Am a Flesh/Text translates the transcript of I Am a Text into a large installation of A3 risographic prints. The text is arranged across a grid of pages, where it can be read vertically, horizontally, partially, and laterally. The surface produces both legibility and interference.
Each print is hand-painted with wax, applied only to the letterforms. This process transforms the printed text into a raised, leathery, tactile surface. What first appears as duplicated print reveals itself, on closer inspection, as slow, bodily, and materially unstable.
Documentation
Installation images/detail images/studio documentation.
Research Relation
This work anchors the relationship between text and flesh at the level of surface. The risograph produces repetition, while the wax reintroduces touch, labour, and difference. The work becomes a field where writing is not only read but materially built up.
Within the project, I Am a Flesh/Text demonstrates how textuality acquires body through repetition, heat, pressure, and accumulation. The printed word becomes skin-like.
QR Relation
Section: Part II: Praxis
Chapter: I AM A TEXT / I AM A FLESH/TEXT
Page: 128
Return to the document: This page provides documentation of the studio work and its surface details.