Adela Laverick

This project explores the texture of our relationship with the book in its entirety: both the visible aspects of the tangible, known cultural history and inherent embedded materiality of the book, and also it’s imperceptible power to connect on an abstract, almost transcendental level.

The work is inspired by, and anchored by a quote from Jacques Derrida: ‘A text is… a differential network, a fabric of traces referring endlessly to something other than itself, to other differential traces. Thus the text overruns all the limits assigned to it thus far.’

The large plaster sculpture of a book acts as the threshold to the experience and invites the viewer to become a reader in the space, and to contemplate their relationship with the book as an object. The pages of commas were transferred directly from ‘De Aetna’ by Pietro Bembo (1496), the first printed book to use the comma as we use it today.  A rhythm of communication links us visually to the original book, but also allows us the freedom to imagine our own narrative between the symbols. I have focused on the comma as a symbol because it gives us the space within the communication, and for every comma, there is an expectation that words came before and more will follow. Removing all text from my work enhances the opportunity for a unique translative experience and for the reader to see and feel beyond the literal meaning of the communication: to the fabric of traces that communicate on a deeper level.