marks & gestures

'Punctuation is not a proper object: it is neither speech nor writing; art nor craft; sound nor silence. It may be neither here nor there and yet somehow it is everywhere.'

'Punctuation marks function as shadow figures that both compose and haunt writing's substance.'

'Intonation - what we might call the trace of the sound of punctuation.'

'Therefore I call them [punctuation] not symbols of Logic, but dramatic directions, enabling the reader more easily to place himself in the state of writer or original speaker.'

Punctuation: Art, Politics & Play, Jennifer DeVere Brody, Duke, 2008

in correspondence to the speaker's breath

'Punctuation. Four stops, two marks of movement, and a stroke, or expression of the indefinite or fragmentary –

Comma , Semicolon ; Colon : Period . Mark Interrogation ? Note of Admiration ! Stroke –.

It appears next to self-evident, that the first four or five characters can never be made to represent all the modes and subtle distinctions of connection, accumulation, disjunction, and completion of sense – of it would be quite as absurd as to imagine that the ? and ! should designate all the moods of passion, that we convey by the interrogation or wonder – as the simple question for information – the ironical – the impetuous – the ratiocinative &c – No! this must be left to the understanding of the Reader or Hearer. What then is their use?'

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

in absentia

In Absentia, created for The Art of Lost Words has been compiled. 24 printed pages, with 8 full-colour photographs tipped in and printed in an edition of 200. The book explores the word 'skirr', its imminent removal from the dictionary and other themes surrounding absence of flight. For six weeks only, from March 5th, copies are available to purchase from text/gallery for £5 and all proceeds from the sales will be donated to the National Literacy Trust.