TM: And alongside, Guston, I know you also use touchpoints of Ferdinand de Saussure’s structural linguistics of thought and sound, the typography of Mutlu Çerkez, and concrete poetry – how do those influences inform your work?
DBA: I have tried to pull in art history references into my work as a way of combining Jennifer’s language and mine, so there are numerous visible influences in the work. To add to your list, John Nixon’s use of orange, the Phillip Guston clocks, the concrete poetry of Hansjörg Mayer, and painter Vivienne Binns. I am constantly inspired and influenced by others and want to foster these conversations in and around the work, which is why I make it a point to have these references and speak to them directly.
TM: Within those influences, curator and writer Tim Riley Walsh wrote about your work and made the point that text becomes a gesture in your art – it’s focusing the literal marks. What do you think it means to see language like this?
DBA: I have been playing with the visual qualities of language, the bodily movement of gesture or mark making, and the physicality of language – instead of language pointing to something else, using these marks to occupy the canvas as composition. As the concrete poets describe, it’s the arrangement of linguistic elements in which the typographical effect is more important in conveying meaning than verbal significance. It is a formal way to play in the studio, which has always been very important for my practice. I have chosen language as another element in my toolbox in the studio, along with colour, form, material etc. I suppose once you start thinking that all language is arbitrary, it is fun to start breaking it down and remaking structures, this has been shown to me by Jennifer, and continued in the paintings.
