This week I introduced the kids to asemic writing – that is wriiting which has no intelligible meaning. It looks like script, or ideograms, with specific characters but yet those characters do not correspond to any actual symbols – hence the word asemic – non-signs. It’s amazing what can be conveyed trough signs, without those signs meaning anything – they are always full of energy and emotion.
I came across this through the work of Henri Michaux. He was really interested in different scripts and made up his own which would just dance around the page. Several other artists use asemic writing, from Cy Twombly to Mira Schendel. The kids were particularly taken by the work of Mirtha Dermisache, who arranged her asemic writing as if it was a newspaper, an idea several of the kids really ran with.
We used a variety of different methods this week – mostly pen and ink but also scaffito and collage.
