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Words on Glass at Marriott Library

 

In 2008, I was commissioned to create a public art project that wound up pushing my practice in an exciting new direction.

The task was to create a glass installation for the J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah. The art selection committee wanted something specific to the library’s private collection. As I spent time in the space and sifted through all kinds of materials, I became fascinated by one particular collection focused on the Westward migration of Mormon pioneers in the 1850s. Among all the maps and documentation of trails, the collection also included a huge number of handwritten diaries which were scanned by the library for easy digital access.

Around that time, I was reading a lot about Brion Gysin and the Surrealist cut-up techniques that he had advanced through his work, juxtaposing fragments of newspaper articles and other found texts to create poetry, essays, audio tracks, and more. I’ve always been interested in collage, and I was curious about how techniques developed specifically for writing could inform visual work. As I pored through the diaries, I had a strong impulse to excerpt some of the texts and see what would happen when they were placed next to each other in different configurations. I was curious about the handwriting and the words themselves as visual elements. On a technical level, I had never “written” words on glass in this way, so the idea presented an exciting challenge.

I began by selecting passages intuitively, pulling out fragments that spoke to me on a poetic level or purely visual level (although I did stick with passages in which the original handwriting was legible). This way of working is one of the reasons I’m so drawn to the cut-up technique. Rather than worrying about artistry or meaning, the internal critic can surrender to a freer sense of play.

I tried the passages out in different configurations until it began to suggest a beginning, middle, and end. As this flow became more apparent, I tweaked it a little more deliberately to solidify the loose sense of narrative. By this point, I was envisioning a work that would span the four levels of the library, so I cut the text into small groups that would take readers on a kind of journey up through each level of the space, starting with the first floor and ending on the fourth floor. Click here to read the full final arrangement.