Recycled Words

Recycled Words; “Sculpted Poetry” (2020)

Recycled Words is a series of short aphorisms and poems made by erasing text from magazines (fashion, sex, music, etc.) using Tipp-Ex. I “excavate” each piece by removing language until a new poem appears. The process is sculptural, and the finished surface becomes painterly in texture. By taking away, I expose hidden structures inside existing text- excavating the voids between words and so looking for imagination in the banal. In this sense, the words are recycled. The work circles intimacy and its contradictions. I bring together words with opposing or juxtaposed meanings, placing the perverse imagination alongside the spiritual imagination. That tension threads through narratives of spirituality, sex, and death: sex as life force and as impulse (Eros), and death as Thanatos—alongside the idea of “dying before dying.” Above all, the series is a quest for union. Through recycled language and overlapping meanings, these pieces aim to evoke the same questions in the reader that arose for me while making them.

Film by @ajcampbellish

• https://www.arts.ac.uk/colleges/london-c...