Warwick Freeman: Sentence (2024):Pink Monkey Bird, Face Ache, Poppy, Hanger Hook, Pāua Brooch, Red Butterfly, Apron Hook
[all exhibition photos by Sam Hartnett]
Yesterday, on Saturday, I went to an artist's talk at Objectspace with the curators of Kiwi jeweller Warwick Freeman's survey show Hook Hand Heart Star. I was there mainly to support Bronwyn, who put three years of work into compiling a massive electronic archive of Freeman's work, then working with Objectspace Director Kim Paton on the content and design of the exhibition, first unveiled last year at Die Neue Sammlung Design Museum in Munich.
But you know how it is, after looking in all the vitrines, listening to Bronwyn's explanations of the objects inside them, and then hearing Warwick's own expositions, I found I was hatching a few opinions of my own. Impudent opinions based on ignorance, no doubt - Art criticism is definitely not my field - but nonetheless of interest to me.
"Sentences", as he calls them, are an important part of Warwick's practice. Arts commentator Hamish Coney describes these as:
linear groupings of ... forms – wee hearts made from pounamu or scoria from Rangitoto, stars formed from lustrous polished shells finished with elegant, serrated edges, metal hooks as metaphors for both weightiness and weightlessness and suggestive wooden hands beckoning, greeting or asking to be held.Here are a couple more of these sentences:
You'll note at once the repetition of particular symbols - or emblems, as Warwick prefers to call them - in the examples given above. They often include butterflies, flowers, hearts, stars, and tiny skulls, in various materials. Freeman refuses to 'read' or 'interpret' them, beyond pointing out that a kind of implicit syntax underlies the logic of their arrangement.
They might, in that sense, be regarded as cryptograms. Or, alternatively, as something analogous to the hieroglyphic inscriptions of the Ancient Egyptians or Mayans.
A long time ago, back in the 1980s, I took a paper in Ancient Egyptian at Auckland University, and learned the rudiments of reading hieroglyphics. They may look like a series of pictures of animals, birds, and body parts - and that's what they originally were - but they evolved over time into a very complex library of symbols, which included a proto-alphabet alongside large numbers of biliterals and stand-alone ideographs.
The point is, they can be read pretty fluently by Egyptologists - as, now, can the even more complex Mayan writing system. What Warwick's sentences reminded me of most strongly, though, were not so much hieroglyphic inscriptions as alphabets.
At one time or another, most of us have probably seen one of those charts which purport to show the growth of the modern alphabet from some set of ancient squiggles. It's not that there isn't a fair amount of truth in this, it's just that it (inevitably) oversimplifies a far more complex and nuanced process.
There are some basic principles at work, however. One is the tendency of an original piece of denotative drawing to be gradually stylised into a set of eventually unrecognisable lines. You'll see that in the chart above in the shift from a bull's head to the letter 'A'.
Another important feature is the use of homophones for tagging sounds to letters. The classic analogy we were given in Akkadian 101 (again at Auckland Uni) ran more or less as follows:
It's pretty obvious what this sign is supposed to mean. "Four sail" = "For sale." It's a pun, in other words. Each of the symbols sounds like another word, so most readers can be trusted to arrive at the correct meaning.
Over time the symbols become streamlined, and the original puns become less and less necessary. Readers already know what's intended, so they read the message through the original images without even being conscious of the play on words.
This is, mind you, an English-language based pun. It wouldn't work in any other language, because "4" and "sail" don't sound like "for sale" in, say, French (à vendre) or German (zu verkaufen) - let alone (say) Russian or Chinese.
Cuneiform, the dominant form of writing in the Middle East for roughly 3,000 years, is a script which originally encoded a series of pictorial puns in Sumerian, but was subsequently adopted by a number of speakers of completely different languages.
None of the original Sumerian puns worked in the Semitic language Akkadian, which succeeded it as the dominant idiom of Mesopotamia - let alone the Indo-European Hittite language, or any of the others it was eventually used to record. But that made no different to how useful it was to have a commonly understood set of signs which encoded particular ideas and sounds.
These two scrawled lines of script from Wadi-el-Hol in Egypt "appear to show the oldest examples of phonetic alphabetic writing discovered to date." They show the origins of a line of development which would eventually lead to the Phoenician alphabet, thence to ancient Greek, and then onto the Latin alphabet which we still use today.
When I gaze at those two scribbled inscriptions from Wadi-el-Hol, though, they remind me strongly of Warwick Freeman's lines of carefully arranged symbols. There's no repetition of objects in Freeman's lines, however, which makes them seem to me less like sentences than alphabets.
After all, the nature of a sentence is that it should contain repeated letters - if not entire words. An alphabet, by contrast, encodes a kind of potential speech: a vehicle for communication rather than the communication itself.
Do these proto-Semitic letters look at all like Warwick's syllabary to you? I have to say, they certainly do to me.
It's not that I want to suggest that Warwick's lines of symbols are decipherable in the same way as other language systems. I do think they're meant to evoke the earliest roots of written language, though - either spontaneously, or because at some point he'd seen and been intrigued by one of those diagrams which show how "our alphabet got to us."
Perhaps, like so many of us, he feels that our writing system - as well as the language we encode with it - is in sore need of a makeover: that we need to look at the world afresh with uncomplacent eyes.
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