Tia Madden, 'Specimens', 2022, Ballpoint pen on stretched, unprimed canvas, 91.5cm x 66cm, string, pins. Image Courtesy: the artist.

Artist statement

Specimens is a consolidation of automatically generated ballpoint pen drawings, organised to deceive legibility, and speculate a world disguised by language. Lamenting the prospect of language deceiving, and perhaps one day failing the self, Specimens ruminates on the legibility of perception if language were not to precede it. Familial histories with Alzheimer’s disease translates into the ongoing project Adversaria by considering memory loss not as losing knowledge, but as losing knowledge’s name.

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