Alastair Noble Argyll, United Kingdom
My artistic practice is a response to architecture and the natural environment and reflects on particular sites in the context of poetry and literature. Alternative approaches to mapping is the crux of my research, I juxtapose and transform words, signs, symbols and texts into installations, artist’s books, prints and drawings.
The source of many of my installations, artist’s books and drawings are derived from writers that address the environment from ancient Greece to the present, some of whom include Heraclitus, Goethe, Nan Shepherd, Hugh MacDiarmid. Their texts works are employed and transposed not to illustrate the words but to reveal alternative visual readings of the works. The drawings are multiple layered inscriptions, as I hand-copying the words. They become interwoven into random patterns transforming language into indecipherable calligraphic notations. A significant element of my drawings result in the juxtaposition of the patterns created by the overlapping written notations that reflect the textures within the texts. My works are devised in series reflecting on a whole poem or short passages from longer manuscripts.
