Meaningful Marks

When I was 4 years old, I was browsing my mothers’ magazines. She was in the kitchen preparing food. I wanted to know what the words captioning the pictures meant. To my unschooled eye they looked like Greek letters – intriguing but indecipherable.

I found an interesting word – longer than most of the words on the page. I marked it with my finger, ran to the kitchen to ask my mother, “What does this mean?” Preoccupied with her task, she impassively read, “Machine. That word is machine.”

Returning to my reading chair, I held my finger tight on the word so as not to lose my place. “Machine, Machine,” I repeated. I scoured the page to find that same configuration of letters. “Machine. Machine.” Then I dropped my face closer to the page to look for the individual letters without knowing their names. “There it is. There it is,” I squealed with delight.

To this day I am entranced by mark-making. Marks that resemble letters, but have no meaning or at least not one that I understand. There is an art form called ASEMIC WRITING. It’s a style of writing that gives the impression of conventional writing but is abstract in it’s meaning.

I am working on a series – that includes asemic writing and symbols… It brings me such joy… [Featured photo – Asemic Writing by Michael Jacobson]