Artist's Corner: Nicola Dale - Blogpost 4

Fourth blogpost by artist Nicola Dale. See her previous blogs here.

Looking at the manuscript of popular magic-kabbalistic diagrams got me thinking about the practice of assigning value to Hebrew letters and what happens in this process. [John Rylands University Library - Gaster Hebrew MS 1482] In what ways is value shifted and meaning altered? 

In my initial responses to the archival objects I created seven pieces of writing, playing with different voices and forms, experimenting with prose and poetry to find a space somewhere in between. I have now translated three of these pieces into a series of numerical values and used these numbers as the basis of a set of sculptural responses.  

There is something satisfying in this approach to creativity - forcing myself to improvise within a very strict set of limitations. I cannot visualize the resultant object and come to feel somehow that the materials and I are working in collaboration, rather than in a hierarchy. There is something strangely other about this process, a touch of something magical.