Artist's Corner: Nicola Dale - Blogpost 2

An update by artist Nicola Dale, currently working on a commission in respose to the 50 Jewish Objects. See her previous blogs here. 

In amongst the 50 Objects is a prayer book from Honan, China [John Rylands University Library, Hebrew MS 24]. It is beautiful and surprising: its carefully handwritten Hebrew looks, at first glance, like Chinese characters. How did the writer hold their pen? Which direction did they write in? How well did they know the paper and how ink would travel its surface? Handwriting inevitably leaves traces of a writer’s origins, habits and education for future readers to puzzle over. It is a reminder of the equal weight of text and context; how ‘reading’ is an activity that stretches far beyond words.

Handwriting aside, the book has two other particularly striking visual features:

First, there is the justified text - its pleasingly equal distribution across each line. This is not a typographical standard I am used to, but I enjoy the impression of ‘wholeness’ or ‘oneness’ that it implies. I will look further into the origins of justification as a framework and use it within my own printed and sculptural responses throughout this project.

Second, the book’s square format invites me to consider the origins of my own habits. In the same way that I unthinkingly adhere to ‘aligned left’ text, I am also used to framing words and images in rectangles (portrait or landscape). In recent years however, I have been forced out of this habit by Instagram, an image sharing app with a square window. This may seem inconsequential to those not working visually, but it is difficult to make images and words look ‘right’ in a square (and even more uncomfortable to admit the power implied by such technology - the desire to reframe our worldview). It is therefore both a comfort and a challenge to find inspiration in the Chinese prayer book’s format: it is a pleasing pre-digital counter to contemporary square framing and a reminder to question the conventions within which we frame our world.