As part of my 'Poetry Seen at Cowslip Sunday' art installation I created two 'branches' of poetry - using lines from a Shel Silverstein poem:
The branches of the poet tree
Reach from the mountains to the sea
I was happy enough with the finished product - see pictures below - which consisted of six pieces of 'laser-cut' plywood, cut into almost cartoon-like tree branches. I knew that the location of the work would be fairly important to how the work would be viewed; ideally it needed clear sky behind it to show it to its best advantage. I have now taken down the work from its original location - with the intention of photographing it in a few different locations in fields around the village of Lambley. Hopefully these images will allow the idea of 'poet tree branches' to take root in people's minds.
One interesting aspect of the creative process involved in producing the branches was that, in order to successfully render certain letter forms - 'a' and 'e' and 'o' for example, I needed to create a link to what would be blank space in printed letters. In order to explain this problem properly I needed to delve into the 'anatomy of type' and it turns out that the empty space inside the letter 'o' is known as the 'counter'. But the blank space in the top of a lowercase letter 'e' is known as an 'eye'. Below you can see illustrations (taken from the 'Typography Deconstructed Anatomy of Type' poster) of these and other examples. I particularly like that certain typefaces (such as decorative serif fonts) give the letter 'g' an 'ear' and the letter 'r' a 'teardrop terminal':
A by-product of the production process I used are the actual letter forms themselves - and the letters that contain 'counters' and 'eyes' seem to become part of an almost imaginary alphabet. You can see these shapes (which feel almost like the bones of small animals) in the photograph below. They remind me of the 'neutral' alphabet that the writer and artist Shaun Tan uses in his book 'The Arrival'.
