Sarah Rhys - Artist

My research and practice has culminated in a series of work on Blackboards. I am interested in the evolution of writing as a form of human communication and embedded in the work are writings that have been fully or partially erased. Written language, being a trace of what has preceded. I am interested in showing that meaning does not have one origin, and that one should challenge the fallacy of given knowledge being the truth. The broader influences on my work are my interests in language, semiotics and mapping.

I am interested in the blackboard as a place where ideas are worked out, discoveries are revealed, messages are left, writing is used to communicate, diagrams are used to illustrate and clarify and of course on which lessons and lectures are traditionally taught. In these various modes those boards represent the evolution of writing as a form of human communication.

I am intrigued by the legacy of the blackboard and there is reference to the monumental discoveries worked out on blackboards. Embedded in the work are writings that have been fully or partially erased.

The traces of Einstein’s theory of relativity and Crick’s DNA formulae are partially erased yet visible on Blackboard Diptych. There is a recognition of these discoveries and their huge effect on scientific thought, yet I repeatedly challenge, through erasure, that given knowledge is the truth and that by becoming more scientifically evolved we are therefore becoming more civilised. The work opposes the western concept of truth being logocentric.

In Eve, I worked up layers of ancient scripts that were then erased, bringing these ruins or ghosts from past civilisations into the present.

Blackboard III is a further stage on to Blackboard II in which I wrote out numerous lines of dictionary definitions of words. I was very conscious that these definitions were always lacking. Graphical signs are always incomplete as they are signs to describe a sound that is given to an object, therefore meaning is deferred as it always carries traces of other meanings that are from word associations and memory.

Here, I worked from the top of the board to the bottom, and once the blackboard was covered in lines of writing, I would then rub them out. This process would be repeated until the layering and interaction of the partially visible symbols was both rich and ambiguous.

I was mindful of Joseph Kosuth’s interest in language and displaying text as in “Art as idea as idea”. In Blackboard III the erasure of the writing, which is partly appropriated and partly automated, is more thorough, leaving just faint traces of what was in existence or present before.

I believe that meaning does not have one origin, and that particular knowledge should not be confused with the truth.

Cy Twombly’s blackboard paintings as well as his interest in erasure were an important influence. Like Twombly I use an invented form of writing within some of my paintings (Blackboard Diptych and The Written) although I am interested in the historical evolution of writing as well as the global languages of maths and computing as evident in Eve. Like Twombly, I am “involved with the matter that has been the history (even the prehistory) of human marks: from the most archaeologically primordial of scratches and incisions to the development of the rhythmic dexterities which would generate calligraphy…” (Simon Schama)

— Sarah Rhys