Imogen Reid's work on paper maintains a compromise between informational clarity and poetic formalism. Erasures, mirrored forensic repetitions and layered overprinting coexist within the tonally ambient meshing of papers textured materiality and artisanal fragility.
Against the obdurate solidity of the concrete Reid posits a multiplicity of repetitions, deformations and subtractions, paper acting as both substance and display screen. Attracted to the transformative movement of the sequential, a way to activate these necessarily inert spatial concretions, Reid conceptually disassembles form, line and the quiet texturing of the page and reassembles momentary constellations of these foundational elements.
The standard directional drag of the reading process is never fully discarded but subtly reweighted in Reid's work. The patterns and grids present themselves as fractal lines of alien text and holistic unities at one of the same time. An active conceptualising process, an anchoring pivot swings the viewer's mode of apprehension from the linearity of text to the bold certainty of graphic solidity.
However, no matter how formally fixed these renderings seem they side-step the calcifying deadness of geometric solidity. Taut and colourful parallel threads imply the anonymity of structuring language’s granular multiplications of atomic units whilst foregrounding the vibrancy of communicative potentialities in a fresh creative jigsawing together of basic visual elements.
A reader-viewer’s physical proximity to the page also allows a visual blurring, a humanizing vulnerability announced by the subtle tactility of the structuring linearity of the printed designs. The implied narrative pull of parallel lines reveal themselves to be territorial mappings of the material, simultaneously synthetic and organic, the burr of fraying threads momentarily static but always straining towards a breaking point and alternative constructive possibilities.
Interweaving and interleaving constructive options for patterns of illegibility within the ecosystem of a book form adds a further temporal dimension to the process of absorbing the visual. The publication becomes a gentle feedback loop of austere calligraphy, a layering of mutating woven genetic codes, a wiry motility embedded in the material fact of the book- object.
An implication of the ambient pin-point flicker of illuminated pixels seems to comfortably coexist with the disciplined rigour of the hand-crafted, the tender bleaching of a potentially strident palette maintaining a consistency of decorative restraint.
Ultimately, the work acts as a refined glossographia of the barebones of visual constructions, an organized grouping of visual elements dependent on activation by the readers eye and hand. Looking and experiencing become sensitive manipulations prompted by the author-artist but never at the expense of losing the democratic and participatory nature of cultural discourse. The hands of the readers as much as their eyes will finally dictate the cumulative resonance of the pages.
A new publication will shortly be released through http://www.rossicontemporary.be/
Reid’s work has appeared in Hotel Magazine, LossLit, Gorse Journal, Zeno Magazine, Elbow Room, and ToCall Magazine. She has participated in Steven J Fowler’s Poem Brut events, and has a pamphlet with Gordian Projects.
