Oxidised mild steel and copper
200 x 200 cm

Some Sort of Notation takes its name from the journals of Alexander Marshack— an archaeologist who, in 1964, published a study on seemingly random, human-made notches on Palaeolithic bones. Adamant that the markings were far from meaningless, he instead proposed that they were complex lunar observations, therefore a proto-writing system. “It is clearly neither art nor decoration,” he’d said, “but some sort of notation.”

This work considers how modern language structures – such as grids, sequences, patterns and repetitions – create illusions of legibility, prompting misrecognitions of language where it mightn’t exist. By affecting how we internally differentiate between image and text, these structures can confuse our transition between looking and reading, opening a space where poetic and erroneous correspondences can occur.

This work weaves connections between the ancient artefact and the science-fictional to continue investigations into the gaps and overlaps between drawing and writing. Some Sort of Notation is an invitation not to decipher, but to misread and to ‘uncode.’ To pull apart, dismantle and unravel the language structures we rely on to resolve feelings of suspicion and duplicity. To draw conclusions, and doubt conclusions; to get lost and disoriented; and to linger in a space where meaning can be glimpsed or sensed, but never fully grasped.

Images: Jessica Maurer