25 Prints from Babel:beautiful, unsayable, meaningless, profound: an exhibition at Castellani House, the National Gallery of Guyana, organised in association with the Guyana Prize for Literature

BABEL is an ongoing series of collages, paintings, digital prints, artist's cards, books, boxes and installations, all derived from experiments with ‘visual language’. Many contemporary visual artists have been fascinated by the aesthetic dynamics of the painted word, the play between ways of meaning and understanding that the crossover of literary and visual 'ways of saying' can produce. There are whole university departments now exploring the philosophical and artistic nuances of visual poetics and the relationships of language, graphic systems and the written word. The BABEL images relate to those traditions and discussions in various ways, asking questions about how we ‘read’ such images, about the relationships between the symbols recognised in these images as linguistic code that carries – or at least implies - particular kinds of utterance and meaning but which in this ‘visual’ context may take on quite other associations, resonances and, not least, colours. BABEL engages with those echoes and shadows, and I am interested in the intellectual, aesthetic and perceptual issues the images – individually and collectively – raise. But BABEL is essentially a playful, whimsical, ironic response to the various pleasures and pressures of a life devoted, one way and another, to the text.