During a recent visit to Tate Modern I came across this collection of drawings by Argentinian artist Mirtha Dermisache. She was a new discovery for me as was the term Asemic writing.
Asemic writing, according to Wikepedia, is a “wordless open semantic form of writing. The word asemic means ‘having no specific semantic content’, or ‘without the smallest unit of meaning’ “
Dermisache said: “I ‘write’ (inscribe) my books, which are perfectly illegible, and that tenuous structure of ‘gaps’ is filled as soon as it reaches the ‘reader.’ “
My most recent text-initiated work finds unexpected resonances in hers. The marks may be different but the idea of the “reader” making sense of the unintelligible connects with what I do.
