Drawing on Language

Drawing on Language: Curiosity, Mischief, and the Body

A Curious Act of Interruption

These drawings began with an instinctive pull toward the dictionary page, a surface traditionally associated with authority, order, and fixed meaning. Growing up, books were treated as sacrosanct objects, something to be protected, respected, never defaced. To draw directly onto their pages therefore felt like a small but deliberate act of rebellion: mischievous, curious, and quietly transgressive.

By intervening in the book, I interrupt its promise of certainty. The dictionary, rather than delivering clear definitions, becomes a site of disruption where language falters and the body takes over. Meaning is no longer stable or contained within words; it becomes something physical, gestural, and instinctive.

A Blessing and a Curse

Dictionaries have always felt like both a blessing and a curse to me. They promise access to meaning and clarity, yet as someone with dyslexia, they are also objects of frustration, dense, rigid, and resistant to intuitive reading. This paradox gives the dictionary a particular charge. It is a tool designed to fix meaning, yet one that has never fully worked on my own terms. Drawing over its pages becomes a way of negotiating that tension, allowing instinct, gesture, and the body to step in where language feels obstructive.

The Body as a Living Gloss

Loose figurative drawings of a larger female form emerge across the pages, not as illustrations of the text but as responses to it. Each figure sits atop paired words, Gag / Gage, Glossful / Glossy, Glee / Gleed, Glory / Gloss, Figure / Figurative, Go, Gambogian / Game. These words are already slippery, archaic, or doubled in meaning, and the drawings act as bodily “glosses” rather than explanations.

Instead of language defining the body, the body annotates language. It obscures, interrupts, and reinterprets the printed definitions beneath it. In this way, the figure becomes a site where meaning is felt rather than read, excessive, unresolved, and alive. The weight and scale of the form resist containment, pressing against margins and refusing the neatness traditionally associated with both language and representation.

Introducing the Titles

Each drawing carries a title that plays with the words printed beneath it. Rather than naming the image literally, the titles embrace rhythm, repetition, and surprise, allowing language itself to become a partner in the work. By pairing, doubling, or twisting the dictionary words, the titles echo the mischievous and curious energy of the drawings, turning the act of naming into a playful extension of the creative process.

Play, Performance, and Not Taking Things Too Seriously

The choice of purple ink is intentional. Purple introduces a sense of playfulness and levity, signalling that these works are not asking to be taken too seriously. Historically associated with power, ceremony, and excess, here it becomes something lighter, almost impish, undercutting the authority of the text beneath it.

The scribbled, looping line carries its own energy. It suggests repetition, insistence, and a kind of restless thinking-through-the-body. There is humour in the overworking of the form, a refusal of polish or idealisation. The figures feel performed rather than posed, closer to acts than images, somewhere between drawing, doodling, and defacement.

Language, Art History, and Material Games

Working with dictionary pages inevitably brings art history into play. The altered book becomes both object and collaborator, recalling artists who have disrupted text through mark-making, erasure, and drawing. The pairing of Gambogian (a historic pigment) with Game acknowledges this lineage directly, a nod to painting’s material history and the idea of art-making as play, experiment, and rule-breaking.

There are also quieter conversations with still life and vanitas traditions: gloss, surface, decay, and transformation hover beneath the work. Just as objects in still-life painting carry symbolic weight beyond their appearance, these words, half-hidden, half-revealed, become charged with bodily and emotional presence.

Somewhere Between Intention and Instinct

Like much of my practice, these drawings sit between intention and instinct. The choice of page is deliberate, but the drawing itself is allowed to unfold intuitively. Figures emerge through repetition and correction rather than precision, as if discovered rather than designed. Curiosity drives the process forward, a willingness to follow visual and linguistic threads without fully knowing where they will lead.

In this space, language loses its authority and becomes porous. The body becomes a mischievous collaborator, unsettling meaning and inviting alternative readings. What begins as a forbidden act ‘drawing in a book’ opens into a playful, speculative world where definitions slip, figures sprawl, and curiosity is allowed to take the lead.

An Invitation to Look Closely

These works in Drawing on Language invite viewers to linger, to notice the friction between word and image, order and excess, seriousness and play. They ask what happens when we stop treating meaning as fixed and allow it to behave more like a body, unruly, expressive, and full of contradictions.

In drawing over language, I’m not seeking to destroy it, but to loosen it. To see what might happen when curiosity is given permission to scribble in the margins and let something unexpected come to life.