the LIFESTYLE

Installment No. 2: The Things That Bring People Together.

The Patchwork: Questions collaboration series involves a process of reconstructing the written word. Through weaving together words from Samuel Bostick’s Questions project, I seek to create opportunities for readers to visually interact with original texts. The content for this piece comes from Questions, Take 3.

From Patchwork: Questions, No. 1 (All Good Things Don’t Last)

I’ve always been interested in the aesthetics of words and lettering, and Samuel’s “Questions, Take 2” from a couple weeks ago inspired me to explore this interest in a new way. I built this piece similarly to how one would build a poem word by word, line by line, but I looked at re-interpreting several visual characteristics such as font, color, size, and placement. Starting at the beginning of Samuel’s poem, I gradually wrote down each line,  but without a linear structure. Lines that were successively linked in the original writing were separated, and other lines were either layered over them or woven through them.

To me, breaking down and re-creating the original poem opens up the text to multiple new meanings and readings that may have been submerged previously. Words and lines that are woven together or placed near each other can be read separately to retain their original meanings but can also be read together to form new sentences with expanded meaning. This is another example of what I think of as “visual sampling,”  where the viewer’s interaction with the piece is a central part of the process of visually breaking-down and reconstructing Samuel’s powerful words.

Reflection and Response

V.