let lemons be angry

Synaesthesia, at the Substation

Ceriph put together a matchmaking project between artists and writers. We would be assigned a text and come up with a typographic work based on it. I said yes, but "no vulgarities please, because I get awkward with those."

My work never shows up well in photographs because I like them faint and close-up. So if you drop by the substation and find my piece, go up close to find the hidden message.

Other pieces I liked: based purely on the artwork.

 by Winnie Goh, who also founded Ceriph

 by Speakcryptic

 by Xin Jie, whose work reminds me of my own

 

 Izyanti from two batches down

 Lau! When I walked in i knew this was hers, the treatment is very typical of her. She likes doing handson, crafty typography. This is carbon transferred onto tracing paper.

And Jonathan aka zxerokool, whose work complimented Jon Gresham's style very well.

Overall I think the pieces communicated the individual artists' pet styles more than the written pieces. Which was one of the dilemmas working on this for me. While I wanted to purely translate Desiree's poem into visuals, I was affected by the need to represent myself truly in this gallery of artists, which includes people like Eeshaun and MessyMsxi. And that affects the creative process, makes it impure somehow. 

I wouldn't say all the pieces captured the essence of the texts completely. There was definitely room for deeper inspection of the literature. But overall I think the matching of artists to writers took care of the basic style match; flashy artists with flashy writers, risque Mojoko with Magritte, and subdued artists with sensitive pieces. 

I hope this exercise happens again. Art can exist in its separate forms, purely colour and line, or purely text. But when put together, they create something new, and affirm the presence of each other. Almost always I am only able to create a drawing because I came up with a written line first. It's that line of words that becomes a picture in my head. And when I write, of course it goes the other way round. I see things in shapes and they fall into alphabets on their way down.