Progress•:•Process

Rachel•Smith

Rachel Smith - Dialogue with Roland Barthes I, 2016, various pens on a photocopy, 21 × 29.7 cm.
Dialogue with Roland Barthes I, 2016, various pens on a photocopy, 21 × 29.7 cm.

As an artist I am interested in the hierarchical tension between process and product, and how this tension can be used to explore both moments of fixity and shifting meaning in language. I use drawing alongside writing and photography as a way of materialising language and exploring thinking in action. My current Ph.D. research Drawing out Language: Disrupting Narrative Sense through Conceptual Writing, examines the ways in which narrativity and meaning-making are habituated in an understanding of the world. Through my art practice I disrupt existing texts by materialising less visible actions around thinking, reading, writing, and speaking. This is in order to challenge the wholeness of meaning implied by narrative structures and to deny immediate coherence. Gaps and spaces as well as the deleted or forgotten are as much of interest as the object of language itself. By fragmenting appropriated content I am able to open up generative spaces which allow for the processes of sense making to be explored and visualised. This space enables an interrogation of the ways in which meaning may be constructed as well as scrutinising the losses and distortions forged in the process of communication.

Testing Testing

It is becoming increasingly apparent, as the research progresses, that the writing of Roland Barthes is an important influence on the development of my practice, whether in thinking, writing, or making art. In recognising this it has become necessary to investigate the punctum moments I have experienced in reading his texts and analyse their emerging relevance in framing my research. The work in this exhibition uses practice as a way of thinking through some of Barthes ideas about reading, writing, and thinking.1 It builds on my recent book-work Reading Words.2 This work is a material exploration of an experience described by Barthes: that of continuing to read, while looking up from a book, as language beyond the written text is constructed in the mind of the reader.3 In expanding my current work I endeavour to have a dialogue with Barthes, through his writing, in order to advance my own thinking via practice. This space enables an interrogation of the ways in which meaning may be constructed as well as scrutinising the losses and distortions forged in the process.

Rachel Smith

Rachel Smith

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1 Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language, trans. by Richard Howard, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd. 1986). [Le Bruissement de la langue, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1984].

——,The Preparation of the Novel: Lecture Course and Seminars at the College de France (1978-1979 and 1979-1980), trans. by Kate Briggs, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). [La préparation du roman I et II. Cours et séminaires au Collège de France 1978-1979 et 1979-1980, Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2003].

2 Rachel Smith, Reading Words, part of the AMBruno artist-book project ‘Words’, originally shown at Leeds International Artist book-fair in 2016, the collection of 16 artist-books can be found in the Poetry Library in the Royal Festival Hall, The British Library, and the Tate Library collection. [http://www.ambruno.co.uk/words.html]

3 Barthes, The Rustle of Language, p. 29.