Creating Spaces: Redacted Poetry Through Papercutting

Abstract

I have worked as a paper artist for many years and the texture, material memory, strength, and fragility of the material are ingrained in me as a practitioner. The relatively recent introduction to my practice of appropriated text documents has led to the creation, through cutting paper, of redacted poetry. This new focus has turned a familiar method of working into an unfamiliar one as new methods have emerged. My interest is in how the creation of three-dimensional forms from cut paper impacts on our understanding of paper as a flat surface used to communicate information. While previously working with printed maps, the introduction of printed text has opened up questions relating to visual poetry—particularly those concerning the transparency of language—and how this connects to the materials and methods of making.

I will focus here on two pieces of work, A Free-Floating Minute (Figure 1) and Coming Home (Figure 2), both made using appropriated books from which I have created redacted poetry within three-dimensional forms. While making these works, the notion of ‘the space between’ has become a meaningful way of examining different aspects of my papercutting practice. These may be spaces between words or spaces that arise between thinking and making, between touch and absence of touch, or between not knowing and knowing. I have found that working with words has drawn attention to these spaces, highlighting that it is often in these spaces that things happen and questions are brought to the fore.

The haptic experience of papercutting, combined with our innate understanding of paper as a material, are key elements of this exploration. Ingold's ‘Correspondence’ where ‘materials think in us, as we think through them’ describes the flow and resistance I find in working with words and paper, allowing the characteristics of the material to influence, even lead, the work.² There is a symbiotic relationship between words and paper in which each need and shape the other to produce the work of art while I, as the artist, need to heed the character of both. Sitting with the text while trying to find the poem within is a significant part of this process and words come to feel like another physical material; one that restricts how I work because they have meaning, and simultaneously one that gives me a way of communicating, of revealing and obscuring information, and of connecting with the paper, words and form.

In ‘Paper or Myself You Know … (New Speculations on a Luxury of the Poor)’, Jacques Derrida observes that paper is often regarded as ‘[…] the ‘blank’ of writing, its spaces and intervals’, acknowledging that paper is largely regarded as a surface for writing, drawing or printing.³ In this light, paper is a means to communicate information but not a significant material in itself. And yet paper feeds into our experience of reading the text. Words and paper are both intimately linked to our culture and changing society; as paper ages the colour, condition and smell all tell us of time passing. Over time documents can become outdated or incorrect as knowledge advances and society changes. Altering materials reframes them, augmenting their original meaning or creating new meaning.

There is a wide-ranging history of appropriation in artworks and of altering texts to create something new. The use of appropriated text fragments in artworks was popularised by Cubism and Dadaism in the latter part of the 20th century, and various forms of visual and altered poetry subsequently became popular. William Burroughs began working with cut-up poetry in the mid-20th century; soon after, in 1966, Tom Phillips began redacting W.H. Mallock's 1892 novel A Human Document to create his epic A Humament. Cut-up poetry, concrete poetry and redacted poetry all use typography or appropriated texts to alter meanings and perception and to challenge the linearity of language that is conventionally read in western cultures from left to right and from the top to the bottom of the page.⁴ These methods, similar to other literary rules such as lipograms (where certain letters or words are omitted from a poem or piece of prose), are often employed by creatives to construct parameters in which to work. My process draws on these methodologies while bringing them within the field of contemporary papercutting.

The connected genre of Artist's Books developed in the 1960s as a way for artists to create and show work outside of the formal gallery setting. They can take numerous forms, and Robert C. Morgan divides them into two types of systems: narrative and concrete.⁵ Artists such as Sol LeWitt and Ed Ruscha worked within the concrete system, exploring ‘logical’ sequences of images or concepts using the linear sequence of the book form, in what is broadly defined as a systems-based approach. A book is multiple things all at once—materials, language, a cultural convention and much more—and many of these things, including books themselves, come with their own set of rules. These can be explored, challenged and subverted within the field of book arts. In my practice, I use the repetitive forms of cubes and houses, altering appropriated documents within those forms to scrutinise the physical material alongside the rules of language and the rules of the book.

The process of creating redacted poetry has been described by critics as ‘sifted text’, restoring ‘the “hidden” poems of [the] host text’ and, by Drucker in reference to Tom Phillips' work, as ‘pulling a new structure out from the flesh and dross of linguistic excess’.⁸ These descriptions all suggest some kind of collaboration between the writer and the words, and the push and pull of searching for a poem within an existing text. Just like paper, words can be shaped and persuaded, and they can also push back and sometimes lead the way. Ingold talks of ‘active materials’ with which the artist joins forces, ‘bringing them together or splitting them apart, synthesising and distilling, in anticipation of what might emerge’.⁹ The back-and-forth between me and the words as I search for a poem within them, testing different combinations for feel and flow, requires as much time, consideration and delicate handling as the cutting of paper. This means getting to know the patterns and rhythms of the words, sitting with them, reading them over and over, trying to split words from those around them and give them new significance.

I am in touch with the words as signifiers—signs—and they are used as signs to both tell the story I compose with them and to tell a story that is no longer visible. Unlike drawing over or blacking out words when material is laid down on a surface, I physically cut away sections of the text while leaving selected words suspended in place on the page, changing the paper's composition and integrity in a way that is irreversible. The parameters are set, not just by the page, but by the template I cut from the page. A symbiotic relationship exists, therefore, among the words, the paper and the form.

As an artist, I experience these elements haptically as I physically cut around the words and coax the paper into a form. When cutting, I am engaged with the feel of the paper with my fingertips and with the tip of my blade as I tease out the text (Figure 3). The blade of the scalpel becomes an extension of my sense of touch, through which I feel the texture of the fibres, the drag of poor-quality paper, or the smooth, clean flow of a sharp blade on a new cutting board. Tiny adjustments to how I hold the blade and how the blade connects with the paper are almost imperceptible; however, learning to make them is a tacit skill that enables me to engage more closely with the paper and the words printed upon it.

In contrast to this ‘flow’ state within my practice, working with words has created a self-consciousness that I have not previously encountered. When words become opaque, we become conscious of their shape, sound and meaning. It is necessary for me to be present and to engage with this opaqueness to draw a poem out of the existing text. When cutting, there are also intentional pauses, or spaces, in which I ensure I am fully present to make a precise cut. These pauses continually ground me, connecting me to the materials I am working with and reminding me that the words will be read.

The words in redacted poetry are both absent and present. While spaces are created by obscuring sections of text in some way, the obscured text is not excess but part of the visual composition and crucial to the reading and understanding of the poem. The spaces add a rhythm of their own and create pauses for breath or thought, forming visual space between words and hinting at the idea that something was once there. Travis MacDonald describes these spaces as ‘a definite beat and measure that must not be overlooked or underestimated’, while Brian C. Cooney talks of ‘the power that those spaces give words hanging in space’.¹¹ The idea that something has been taken away becomes part of the reading experience. Drucker likens the composition of text art and visual poetry to scoring; a visual work ‘performs itself on the page, in the head, through the eye. There is the staged and the upstaged, the space of the page, and the activated fore, middle, and background’.¹² And this is further exaggerated when the poem is physically ‘hanging in space’ within a three-dimensional form, perhaps with some of the words obscured and the view through the form locating them in space (Figure 4).

The spaces between words in my paper forms, therefore, are more than just blanks or spaces. Instead, they are voids that reveal both sides of the page at once, splitting apart the tacitly understood rules of the book and creating an interplay among words, paper, space and form. Just as Ingold describes materials as active, these spaces between are also active. The words are brought out from the page by these active spaces, allowing the viewer to see through the form, which draws attention to the transformed paper, the delicate material that remains and its relationship with the words printed upon it. The work becomes not only about the text but also about how the interrelation of all the elements of making, materials and time coalesce with the redacted poem that has emerged. The words lead the eye across, around and within the form and the grid-like structuring of space in which the reading of the poem fluctuates, resonating with Michel de Certeau's description of stories as ‘spatial trajectories …. geographies of actions’.¹³ The poems themselves are active, shifting from layer to layer, meandering around the form, taking the viewer on a journey that is both conceptual and material. This sense of interconnecting elements in visual poetry is discussed by Bohn; ‘In the absence of conventional grammar, concrete poetry employs a spatial syntax. Words are free to combine with each other visually as well as verbally, vertically as well as horizontally’.¹⁴ The three-dimensional form amplifies these vertical and horizontal connections and introduces new interactions in space.

These interactions are augmented in pieces such as A Free-Floating Minute (Figure 5), where forms are placed within forms, echoing the physical and metaphorical layering of information in a book. The poems are interrupted, obscured or entirely hidden by other layers or by the surface on which the form sits. We look for some sense within the chaos. Conversely, Coming Home (Figure 6) has only one word selected on each small house form that can be read linearly as a poem. The frame of each house inevitably has decipherable words remaining on it, which creates some visual confusion and also adds to the sense of a journey in which the poem is to be discovered. The houses are nestled together, set within the book from which they were cut, some deep within the pages and the others progressively higher up, with the final row of three houses sitting on the edge of the book cover. They have the feel both of emerging from the book and also of being immersed, almost swallowed by it. The space cut into the book allows for a view within; the edges of the cut pages can be seen, as can the black ink of dissected words, which creates a visually tactile experience.

In Bookwork: Medium to Object to Concept to Art, Garrett Stewart uses the term ‘demediation’ to describe the process of creating book art by obliterating information within an existing book, so it is no longer readable in its original form. In works such as A Free-Floating Minute and Coming Home, however, the book is not demediated, as the remaining words encounter and extend the original text, ‘bound by [their] resonance with [the original text] and let loose by the air introduced between the words’.¹⁵ For the viewer, the familiarity of the book object prompts two things: recollection of their physical experience with books—their weight, texture and smell—and the association with the cognitive space of reading—described by Stewart as the ‘present elsewhere’.¹⁶ The fluctuation between the present elsewhere and the materiality of the book is what is being considered in these works through the splitting apart of texts and distillation into redacted poetry. This duality creates an ongoing shift in perception for the viewer between the conceptual and material, which are two ways of understanding the book itself. We see ourselves in relation to the book but we also see the words, opaque and on paper, suspended amid the active spaces, ‘integrating intellectual and intuitive experience into a complex whole.’¹⁷

This is made possible by the words that create a sense of intimacy and are an anchor that draws the viewer in, intrigues them, and holds their attention as they search for meaning. And yet there is a tangible space between the sense of knowing—because they can see what has been performed—of not knowing and of discovery, delight even, in encountering such a familiar material as paper in such an unfamiliar context. The viewer moves around the work, following the words and experiencing a constantly evolving composition in which both the interior and exterior, two sides of the same page that were never intended to be viewed together, can be seen at once. This brings the viewer's attention to the space of the work and gives them a space to place themselves in.

In his article ‘Knowing by Being-There Making: Explicating the Tacit Post-Subject in Use’, Cameron Tonkinwise states that ‘Makers do not so much see what is there physically in front of them, but rather see what might be there, what could become of what is there before them’.²⁰ Appropriated materials prompt the viewer to see things in this way as well, revealing the world in a more dynamic way because if there is potential for everything we see to be different, it opens up a new relationship with materials. We are prompted to really look at the paper the words are printed on, the form of the book and the shape of the words to see things differently. It is not, after all, really a question about whether you can know the unknown, arrive in it, but how to go about looking for it, how to travel’.²¹

Tonkinwise refers to moments of silence in which artists ‘know’. These moments of silence are not the pauses in practice, although they can be, but are part of the ‘flow’ of making. This suggests that knowing is something that exists in the stillness of the mind when in flow. My experience of an alteration in this flow state, while more self-conscious, allows a deeper sense of the vitality of the book, the paper, and the words and an awareness of how this continues beyond the making process in the viewer's perception. By bringing to the fore, our innate understanding of paper, books, and the printed word, the work connects with us both viscerally and haptically. The curiosity evoked by the materials and their capacity to be different, to be handled differently, and to communicate differently is not about understanding them but about being aware of their potential to lead us somewhere. Over time, then, it has become clear that what seemed like a pause in my practice is not actually a pause at all. It is a period of being still, of becoming familiar with the words; perhaps, a pause of sorts but an active pause between not knowing and knowing. A necessary period of quiet and absorption in someone else's words before I find something in them that is mine.