The Prognosticator, Mixed Media on Paper, October 2020
This was born out of two fortune-telling concepts: ‘manifestation’ from the subconscious, and the classic meme format in which a wordsearch is presented and the first words seen describe things like ‘your next year’ or ‘your love life’. I’m interested in the paranoid feeling of inevitability in these ideas, that what you fear or think about or pay attention to determines your future, because it’s not completely untrue.
By putting letterforms on a grid haphazardly and making words when they suggested themselves, I felt I could get a picture of my mental state. I felt additionally that other people could do the same, by drifting an eye over the grid and making connections, the slight rotation and uneven weighting of size and contrast amongst the letters disallowing any sort of organized ‘reading’ of the letters.
