A romantic message

Text based art with the words ‘Love will always find a way’ followed by the words ‘of ruining your life’.

It is a message warning against the over-romanticisation and idealisation of love.

Time passing

The words Tick and Tock in a design to imply the passing of time, with the individual words positioned so that they merge together and become hard to decipher as words rather than just shapes.

Some of the words Tick and Tock in the design are displayed in different colours in order to help make the design understandable. If all of the words were in black the individual letters would display enough cues to make them differentiable as letters, with the whole design being interpreted as a single pattern of lines. In some ways I don’t want the design to be obviously understandable, as the design is meant to signify time (and the passing of time) which is something that is beyond our ability to grasp in a meaningful way.

Text design with a distorted reflection of the letters.

This is a piece of text art in which I’ve taken the word ‘TYPE’ and inverted the text to form a reflection of the word. I’ve then elongated the letters in the reflected word to a point where they become hard to read as letters. The normal letters fused with the inverted letters then take on the appearance of strange symbols.

How female artists are often described

An artist in her own right

This text is inspired by the common description of women artists who are married to, or who are the partners of, male artists as ‘an artist in her own right’.

The text reads: Barbara Hepworth’s husband was an artist in his own right.

Barbara Hepworth’s husband was the artist Ben Nicholson.

The term ‘she was an artist in her own right’ implies that the woman was probably considered to be a lesser artist than her husband. In the case of Hepworth and Nicholson, it was Hepworth who was the more high profile artist.

This is a piece about discrimination, equality and the position of women in society.

Text-based art:

We’re all travelling at the speed of time

And we can’t slow down.

I like the concept of the speed of time, because in some ways it doesn’t make sense. It’s measuring something in terms of itself. What speed is time travelling at? Is it one hour per hour?

The passing of time is a very human concern, but personally I think that it may be even more concerning if it actually stopped passing!

And there’s always the dilemma that if time slowed down you wouldn’t notice, because you’re completely immersed in it (a bit like being in a train with the windows blacked out so that you can’t see how fast the outside world is passing).

Creatures like birds which tend to move a lot faster than we do sense time passing at a different rate. They look at us and see us lumbering along in a similar way to how we see tortoises moving. Similarly, tortoises see us as zipping around the place at dizzying speed. They probably can’t comprehend of the speed of birds.

Slogan on a T-shirt

I’m not a slogan T-shirt kind of guy.

A T-shirt with a slogan on it that contradicts what it says. It’s a bit oxymoronic.

The letter E (composed of lots of letter Es).

A bit of typographical design.

The letter E composed of a black rectangle with a couple of rows of small white letter Es superimposed on it.

Viral homophones

A piece of text-based art playing on the fact that the words influenza and influencer are near homophones (and actually are homophones if you’ve got the right accent).

Not only are they near homophones but they also have the following relationship in common: influenza is a viral infection and an influencer would like to be viral too.