Word Room (The Professors Study)
Paper through practise and written research presented at Spatialising Illustration symposium 2013.
This (peer-reviewed) paper introduces a short sequence of animated text, drawn from a paragraph in Willa Cather’s novel of 1925, The Professor’s House. Devised as research through practice, the initial intention was to present the animation, looped, as a sited ambient work, without a supporting paper. But as the work progressed, writing and making became an integrated research process and so they are presented here as one work, each part elucidating the other. The purpose was to work experimentally with a text that had been considered in my previous research, in which the study had been identified as one of several particular and recurrent images of domestic space found both in visual art and literature[i]. The animated ‘deconstruction’ of the text is not primarily a literary analysis, but a visual exploration of the ‘building’ of a space in words.
The choice of this quote was directed by the unusual characteristic of summation of the novel in one paragraph, the simplicity of the language used to express this complexity and the graphic expression of the room on the page.
Full text of paper and symposium publication here
