Inge Bruggeman

Tensive Language , 2018

 
9 x 8.5 x 6 in

This series of sculptures is made of the same repeated page printed on Bruggeman’s Heidelberg Windmill press. It is a page from Semantics: The Nature of Words and Their Meanings published in 1941. Bruggeman did an earlier piece in an exhibition titled The Possibility of Being Fully Rewritten that had large towering stacks of prints that people could take away. She then became more interested in the edges of the sheets than what was printed on the surface — how the torn edges looked like land formations. This theme resurfaces with this work and her recent move to Reno, Nevada and being influenced by the natural environment there. “Tensive Language with the metal type embedded/frozen in the geological strata of pages,” says Bruggeman, “talks about the rigidity of language. Although language can be beautifully descriptive and imaginative, there is a side to it that is darker…names and naming can lead to stereotyping and actually stop our powers of imagination and description. If we know a name for something, we tend to think we understand it and stop there instead of investigating further or finding other ways of defining and describing.”

The individually printed pages are torn down by hand and then the back edges are glued as a perfect bound book would be.

series for $2200

SOLD