The asterisk refers to text in the footnotes—content that, for various reasons, is deemed unfit for the main story.

In the same way that a map can never fully describe the terrain, language can never capture the entire context or all the details of the material world. Something is always left out—relegated to the footnotes, you might say.

The sign is also used to blank out letters in profanities. These words interest me. They, too, contain multiple or indeterminate meanings. You can conduct entire conversations using only one of them. Sometimes I wonder whether language itself is not an asterisk. True meaning is always to be found somewhere else: in subtext, mistakes, and contingencies; in the body and in the material.

 

Presentation video | Work in progress video

The works in this series feature speech balloons or thought bubbles familiar from comic books. I use these symbols as metaphors for language as a container. Language places certain aspects of material reality into categories represented in the mind. It is through these categories that we experience the world. These containers are continuously updated in response to incoming sensory information, yet nothing outside their boundaries can enter our consciousness.

 

The realm beyond language remains inaccessible to us—what Kant described as das Ding an sich (the thing in itself), or what might be understood in Lacanian theory as the Real. However, in these works, the tails of the speech balloons often point outwards, beyond the frame, as if something outside the semantic universe of the image were speaking. Perhaps material reality itself.

 

Matter is the only substance that physically exists, and within it, the preconditions for language are already latent. Matter tends to organise itself according to certain laws or principles, and as these structures become sufficiently complex, life emerges—a self-sustaining system of organised matter, perhaps indistinguishable from language itself.

Res Ipsa is a compilation of works made by an act shaping the filler once it is prepared inside the frame. The works thus function as a recording device and give a statement of the event taking place while the filler was still wet.

Res Ipsa is Latin for "the thing itself" and is part of the juridical term "Res ipsa loquitur" (the thing speaks for itself), used when an injury or accident in itself clearly shows who is responsible, such as an instrument left inside a body after surgery.