‘BABEL: beautiful, unsayable, meaningless, profound’ is an ongoing
series of collages, paintings, digital prints, artist’s cards, boxes and installations all derived from experiments with ‘visual language’.

There are long traditions in Islamic, African, Oriental and European art of artists and poets playing with the visual elements of letter forms and printed text – from Egyptian hieroglyphs, through Celtic illuminated manuscripts and Chinese calligraphy, to Koranic decorations in Arabic script and contemporary experiments in ‘concrete poetry’ and cyber texts. Many contemporary visual artists have been fascinated by the aesthetic dynamics of the painted word, the play between ways of meaning and understanding that the crossover of literary and visual ‘ways of saying’ can produce. To list just a few whose work I have found particularly instructive in different ways; Tom Phillips, Ian Hamilton-Finlay, Paul Peter Piech and looking
further afield, the Chinese artist Xu Bing, the Ghanaian Kwesi Owusu-
Ankomah and the Australian Rosalie Gascoigne. There are whole university
departments now exploring the philosophical and artistic nuances of visual
poetics and the relationships of language, graphic systems and the written word.

The BABEL: beautiful, unsayable, meaningless, profound images relate to those traditions and discussions in various ways, asking questions about how we ‘read’ such images, about the relationships between the symbols recognised in these images as linguistic code that carries – or at least implies – particular kinds of utterance and meaning but which in this ‘visual’ context may take on quite other associations, resonance and, not least, colours.

BABEL: beautiful, unsayable, meaningless, profound engages with those echoes and shadows, and I am interested in the intellectual, aesthetic and perceptual issues the images –individually and collectively – raise. But this makes the project sound too heavy and pompous.

BABEL is essentially a playful, whimsical, ironic response to the various pleasures and pressures of a life devoted, one way and another, to the text.

And there are other, less wordly, less academic, echoes and shadows that
seem to me now to have influenced these BABEL images, however obliquely – carnival and masquerade; ‘Dutch wax’ textiles in Nigerian cloth markets, Pitchy-Patchy and Jon Kanoo and Obby Oss and Sallah parades; garishly painted slogans on West African buses, decorated Hausa buildings; stained glass windows; Fante flags and Union banners; West Indian cricket crowds; Kente cloth and Quaker quilts and Fulani blankets and Welsh rag rugs; Matisse cut-outs and Roman mosaics.. Some of the BABEL: beautiful, unsayable, meaningless, profound images have evolved from the printed textual detritus that inundates all our lives, much of it uninvited – advertising flyers, faxes, free newspapers, e-mail spam etc. – and quite a lot of it unintentional too, via computer and printer generated texts. BABEL also employs found texts, sometimes literally found, having been lost or abandoned by their previous keepers – notable among these a copy of Marx’s Capital found, with its covers torn off, in a builder’s skip. Then there are the masses of ‘unnecessary’ texts that a place like a university – where I worked for more than 30 years – produces every day – minutes and memoranda and drafts and discussion documents. And in a multi-cultural city like Birmingham, alongside the restaurant signage and advertisements in ‘foreign’ scripts are council and school and hospital documents that come written in eight different languages, so that one feels sometimes that we are drowning in texts of one kind and another. For the BABEL project this textual material is worked in various ways: recycled, juxtaposed, overlaid, cut through, coloured, painted, rearranged, printed, copied and recopied to construct these images which become, I hope, ‘beautiful, unsayable, meaningless, profound.

‘Beautiful, unsayable, meaningless, profound’, that line is taken from my
poem ‘Letterland’, written around the time my two children were learning to
read and write. (Letterland was a popular reading scheme at the time.) The
poem plays with the ways that words help us to understand the world and
indeed to understand ourselves. ‘Letterland’ forms the bridge between the
literary and the visual aspects of this BABEL project. Both as a writer and a
critic I have been interested in the ways other writers have negotiated the
boundaries of standard English. West Indian writers have experimented with the capacity of English orthography to reflect the ways people actually speak, in creolised versions of English that were born out of the linguistic confrontation of the slave coasts of West Africa and the plantations of the Caribbean. In this regard the work of the Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite has been especially significant, in particular his later work, the “writing in light” formatted in his “Sycorax video style” on his computer. His engagement with the historically oppressive language of colonisation, not least as it is represented as text, has proved both a challenge and an inspiration. The other literary figure whose work has affected the evolution of the BABEL project, however tangentially, is the Nigerian poet Niyi Osundare. I have written several essays on the complex relationship in his work between his mother tongue, Yoruba, and the English language of his poetry. The idea of one language informing, inflecting and ‘showing through’ the other in various ways, ‘colouring’ our understanding, is
part of what the project is all about.
 

The BABEL: beautiful, unsayable, meaningless, profound images exist in
several states and formats – as one-off painted and constructed ‘artworks’, or treated in various additional ways as limited-edition digital prints and printed artist’s cards. The artist’s cards and digital prints are perhaps the logical final versions of the project, the end result of the recycling process from printed source to remade, re-printed multiple artwork. The cards and prints are not ‘reproductions’ of ‘original art works’ – although proto-versions of most of these images exist as one-off paintings or collages – rather the several processes of scanning, editing, cropping, re-colouring and printing change those images in ways that are particularly significant in the context of this project, remaking them as printed text-derived art works in their own right. These are not giclee prints, which is a process of very accurately reproducing an artwork in a photographic format, rather these are printed using the more traditional technology (albeit mostly digital) used to make books and other printed textual materials. The images take up approximately the space of a panel of text in a standard format book. This actual book bound sampler version of BABEL, then, brings the project full circle, especially if you were to come across a discarded copy in a builder’s skip!