Writing with my home-made bamboo quill;

I wrote in Russian, so when I put the piece on the wall people could appreciate the script but nobody would be reading what I was writing.

Writing & running;

Writing & running up stairs;

Much difference? Not really. Moving swiftly on...

Curled around. Interesting.

Next I moved onto writing with wire. I chose white wire because I felt it would look less rough. Each day I recorded in wire, the most exciting thing that happened. It was a quicker process than I thought it would be. I wrote, and wrote, until the roll was gone. While I was waiting in the queue to rent an SLR camera to photograph the finished piece, I decided to take the wire down to the photocopier. However, I wasn't very impressed with the images produced. My presentation here doesn't help;

I then went on to photograph the wire;

Once I was finished photographing the wire I hung it over my studio space. It is a bit lost up there as the text is so small. I plan to make more to add to it but I'm having trouble sourcing white wire. If I don't find some soon I'll resort to white spray paint;

I felt like for the most part I'd confined myself to working on paper. I wanted to expand my repertoire and look towards alternative surfaces and writing implements. I also wanted to start working more with colour, and branch into 3-D. To start, I had an idea in my head of sticking pins into the foam used in making advent wreaths and writing between the pins using thread. I didn't know how this would turn out. I then thought about using something like Styrofoam. I headed down to the materials storeroom to inquire about Styrofoam or anything similar. I was handed a small block of Styrofoam so I decided to work with that. I wanted to see a different form of movement within my writing, so I stuck in the pins to restrict the movement of the curves and loops. I cut up pieces of wire to stick into the foam as opposed to pins, as it was more in keeping with my budget. My writing now appeared very angular, sharp and completely illegible. I like that the sentences don't even recall text;

I then took it down to the photocopier to see could I get a different view of the piece;

I wanted to work bigger in terms of scale so I set out writing large sentences across rows of A1 sheets. Before this I had experimented with poster paint. The paint did give me lots of tonal range and lines as a result of the brush strokes. However, I didn't like the result;

Instead of choosing ink or paint I opted to work with compressed charcoal worked into with a putty rubber, for an added sense of movement and motion. I wrote each sentence first with charcoal and then worked over them with the putty rubber. I repeated this process until the page could no longer be written on;

[I apologize, the quality is appalling, but it's a photograph of a photograph on my phone]

Ending up with over thirty of these sheets, I decided to cover my box of a bedroom with text;

I then arranged these photographs into one big picture in my sketchbook;

I then hung these sheets up in my studio one night. However I felt they had much less impact in the bigger space;

I took some pictures of the lines on a zoom to try and capture the varying movement and motion. I like the different tones too that resulted;

I next decided to flip these pages upside down and go again!

I rewrote over to produce these;