Image as Text
4 - 28 Mar
Image as Text / Text as Image...
a survey of bookworks by Ken Orchard 1982 to present
This survey exhibition of ‘bookworks’ by South Australian artist Ken Orchard, reveals a long-held preoccupation with the printed word and image. Image as Text / Text as Image showcases a large body of works on paper including meditations on poetry, a collage series, acetate-based manipulations of published images and a series of magisterial woodcuts.
Created over a twenty-year period the work retraces a very personal artistic journey through the interplay between text and image. From the tightly controlled reworkings of found materials and enormous woodblocks created with sheets of plywood from the 1980s and 1990s to the looser, more spontaneous surface irritations of antique books made more recently with brush, ink, pastel and shellac, Image as Text / Text as Image mirrors the chronology of significant changes in the artist's life.
Image:
Ken Orchard, Disorient World (detail) 1985
Twenty plates from a series of 52 collages on pages from 'Chatterbox Annual', Wells Gardner, Dareton & Co., London, 1911
No. XX 'His Majesty was for a few moments terror-stricken'
