Detail from the video

This detail is from the piece shown in the video in my last post. One difficulty with lettering and calligraphy is obtaining copyright for the words that you want to use. Without words there is no work. One solution to the problem is to use your own words or to collaborate with others to create the words. In this work I collaborated with school children, via their teachers, to use the children's experiences of a journey to Italy.

The brown letters are derived from the letters found on standing stones throughout Wales and represent an interpretation of the carved letterforms introduced by the Romans. These letters are irregular and may often contain different forms of the same letter in one line. They represent the struggle by celtic people to reproduce the work of others using unfamiliar signs and their attempts to contain these symbols in a structure with the added problems that the medium of stone carving presented. These letters are often found on stones that also contain Ogham signs, which may have been the more familiar signs to the carvers of these stones.

The principal language used in this work is Welsh, the language used by the children to describe their journey. This is only partially translated as I was not as concerned with the meaning of the work as the aesthetic of the work.

The 'pages' are hung from a wooden support to form a book, but are free to rotate and allow different readings of the text.