ASEMIC WRITING
The book, 'Asemic The Art Of Writing' by Peter Schwenger is a definitive and comprehensive exploration of the history and meaning of asemic writing. Its opening chapter explores the origin of the word asemic as first used by Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida independently of each other that for Barthes was applied to a word produced by a typographical mistake and Derrida to describe the blank space between words.
In the 1990s the word was adopted by Tim Gaze and Jim Leftwich to describe the units of language in a text used for other reasons than that of producing meaning.
My approach to the asemic is informed by this latter idea.
When I create an asemic work, my hands are mimicking the act of writing with the intention of producing 'meaningless' texts. These then, open up to infinite interpretations as their 'meaning' is made in the viewer/reader not in the text itself. A form of 'automatic' writing, this process/practice lends itself perfectly to my intuitive playfulness.
Below are some examples of my asemic works -
