Rachel Smith

read(writ)ing words

 

This experimental work assembles fragments from a material dialogue around reading, writing, and making. This is a collective response to reading which is both ‘insolent but smitten’. Jean Paul Sartre’s autobiography Words provided the source reading material, though what is generated extends beyond any faithful study of the original text. Interruption, error, and distraction are considered useful tools in the making process as language is repeatedly drawn away from the comprehensible towards the asemic.

 

Read(writ)ing Words performs a network of the reader who cannot help but write. A compulsion of annotations, erasures, fractures, and collisions— on, in, and of language. These ‘inky stains of the as-yet-un-spoken’ are a reading-as-seeing-as-touching-as-tearing. In following Serge Tisseron in that ‘all writing is drawing’ Rachel Smith has produced an ‘un-mastered’ marvel of the unruly.

— Emma Bolland

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