The works exploit the interaction between a mirror, vibrated with sound, and a laser reflected onto a photographic medium to visualise the audible. By visualising language, presenting it in a way where it is no longer “readable”, the aesthetic component is no longer overshadowed by meaning and a previously overlooked aspect of reality is brought to the fore.


The cause-effect relationship that underpins this process means that, theoretically, it should be possible to reconstruct the sounds that make the forms, from the forms that the sounds have constructed. This direct link between the two iterations of information allows for an exploration not only of the abstract's ability to represent but of the boundary between what we perceive as abstract and what we don't.

This is exemplified in the Signifier/Signified series, in which words that have gone out of use in the English Language are the input to the visualisation process.




Words that have gone or are going “extinct”, occupy a space where they sound like they belong to the language they are from but could equally not be words at all. Much like hearing a language you don't understand, their form rather than their meaning dominates. This quality, the emphasising of the aesthetic of the word over its meaning, mirrors precisely what the process used to visualise them does. Presented alongside the definition of the word, an equivalence and a tension between the abstract form the word creates and its meaning is established.


Language is deconstructed in Units of Sound, where one photograph of each phoneme in English was taken. Phonemes, the units of sound that comprise a language, are at the border between what we discern as a sound or as a word. Between something which has meaning and something which doesn’t. The projection of the laser from the machine, undulating in time as a soundscape emits from its speaker, makes apparent that these seemingly unrecognisable shapes have their basis in something we hear and use everyday.




This deconstruction goes a step further in my newest series Fundamentals. The organic, almost three dimensional forms are representations of sine waves increasing in amplitude. These are pure tones - notes that contain only one frequency or pitch. 


All sounds can be expressed as an addition of sine waves, and as such they can be considered as sound’s fundamental unit. From this perspective, when we make a noise, pronounce a phoneme, speak a word, or articulate a thought - we are rapidly producing selections of these forms. Imprinted onto air, they travel, unseen, in all directions, waiting to be decoded and understood.

In June 24, my experimentations in language and sound visualisation were shown alongside the works of Catalina Renjifo. Below is documentation of the joint exhibition, together with the exhibition text which was kindly written by Finn Fordham, professor of English at Royal Holloway University. For more information on Renjifo’s art practice please see her website here.




For good or ill, Art’s role, since Arthur Rimbaud, has been to bring about a “dérèglement de tous les sens”, a disruption or a deregulation of all our senses, usually understood to be those five enablers of sensation and experience.  But the injunction is to assess tous les sens, not just those five, but the totality of sense.   So ‘sens’ carries the sense of ‘meaning’, projecting a more abstract quality around that deceptively innocent little sound.  Rimbaud would have a deregulation of all meanings and all meaning, an unruliness towards the rules of communication.  


Such a disruption is what Catalina Renjifo and Peter Vance perform in these subtle, enigmatic, and comical works.  

They do so by digging, from opposite ends, into a paradoxical matter: how might we communicate miscommunication?  How can we reconnect with alienation?  The results may seem to be little riddles or unanswerable questions, koans.  We might still want to gather sense in their direction.  But, using monochromatic forms that parody the monochromatic world of our textual world of words, they parody the ways we look to do this. 




Vance begins with the sound of a word, then re-encodes it to produce a form that, lacking any decodable system, is unreadable.  

Renjifo begins with a form, then adapts it into a series to produce the appearance of a code that, lacking any coded system at its root, is also unreadable. 

Vance’s words are obsolete, here dug up, recovered, and revoiced, encouraged again to have an effect on the world.  The resulting forms resemble random scrawls, spirographs gone wrong (as they tended to once you’d brought the toy back from the shop), stains left strategically on plain little stools.  But they are in fact precise representations of a sound as it impinges on a laserbeam, whose distortions then compose a form.   

Renjifo’s forms resemble an obsolete script, dug up by an archaeologist, the traces of a lost civilization, but are a pseudo-alphabet whose shapes stem from the four square construction of a window frame.  This is the archetype of the structure that mediates, separates and organizes; the eye of architects, that gives us the illusion of being a portal through which reality comes pouring.  The ‘words’ resemble graffitied propaganda for either side of a civil war in a foreign land, stern instructions or subversive protest.  But they are neither, having no discoverable origin or ‘sense’, no skin in the game. 




Vance and Renjifo meet at a point where conventional readability - not so much all our senses, but all ‘sense’ - is disrupted.  And yet the process of their production is where a sense of meaning returns to their work.  The process, once outlined, re-encodes the enigmatic product.  They share the meaningfulness of process alongside the product’s meaninglessness.   The result is a reinvigoration of the sense of wonder that we experience when we sense the world not as encoded script but as a script that we ourselves may encode, so that we form thoughts, and thought forms things. 

Finn Fordham, 2024