The Asemic Terrain

Remy Dean

Remy Dean on ‘The Asemic Terrain’

I have this idea that our living landscapes are already poems written in a language of minerals, chemical processes, and ongoing energy exchanges. It is an unfinished epic poem, already spanning billions of years but with a fractal metre of minutes, months, millennia… land stanzas spanning portions of our perceptive interaction through the lens of living.

Our word ‘poem’ proceeds from the French poème, Latin poema, Greek poēma, already an ancient variant of poiēma meaning ‘fiction’, derived from poiein meaning to ‘create’… ergo : Creation is pre- and post-literate Poetry : ad infinitum.

My favourite modes of expression are words, objet-avec-courte-histoire, photography, and drawing. I found it only natural to fuse my photography of natural landscape with other media, veering toward asemic writing, and visual poetry. Finding and forging a way of linking external and internal terrains. More recently, this has evolved into a processional formal approach fused with a poetic code of mark-making. The writing is not necessarily drawn directly from the land, but involves a personal response to relationships within the landscapes and the emotional construct of an interior psychological terrain. So far but a glimpse.

The sediment and strata that give structure to the surface are revealed in the layer cake of cliff faces and their solid rhythm of ages set the grid for my Land Poems photography which also precipitated the linear Processionals. The bars of sandwiched colours adhering to the line by line stacking of phrases in traditional poetry and conventional text.

Experimenting with the gesture of writing as a form of drawing, I endeavour to find common ground for writing and visual art to cohabit. Using the same pathways from mind, through brain, to hand — utilising those same conditioned (hand-writing) reflexes to create a unique visual language of mark-making that shares many formal elements with writing, without the encumbrance of literal meaning… Expressing emotions whilst avoiding the deliberate formation of word-language and so, perhaps, circumventing the cultural dogmas often attached to words and languages. One perceptive viewer described this as, “a tiny form of dance, recorded visually.”

Thus, moving the writing from linear format, through chaotic cloud-forms, and into the radial arrived at the 360 series of calligraphic poems. These reference the Zen art of the Ensō 円相 whilst exploring the gestural expression of asemic hand-writing in cyclic verses and can be approached as a contained form of abstract expressionism. As with Ensō paintings, consideration is also given to the balance between the inner self and one’s circle of outward influence in relation to the microcosm and macrocosm, the poetic resonances that reach from the molecular to the galactic scale… the neurological to the spiritual.

Yet these poems remain at one with the land. The only perfectly circular horizon is the visual limit created by the curvature of the planet from the middle of a still sea, upon some imagined, featureless plain, or somewhere off-world. Perhaps, I hope to map the accumulated arcs of a fractured and imperfect horizon that marks the meeting of internal and external worlds?

Remy Dean