Nightlanguage

2010
Series of Hand-stamped Prints


17 hand-stamped unframed A4 Sheets, plus photocopied take-aways

Images: © Tim Etchells

Nightlanguage comprises a series of 17 A4 prints, made using a rule-based game with language to create a collection of invented compound words, each beginning with the term ‘night’.

Taken together, this partial dictionary or catalogue of new words, by turns absurd and clumsy and yet strangely poetic and evocative, stages a collision between ‘night’ on the one side – with its contradictory connotations of mystery, darkness, rest, sleep and dream – and a range of diverse objects, occurrences and events from daily life on the other side. In Nightlanguage we are asked to imagine such things as nightbreakfast, nightroads or nightterror, as well as nighthouses, nightvoices and nightpicnics. In constructing this incomplete taxonomy of nightthings, Nightlanguage emphasises the arbitrary construction of language and its endless possibilities, repeatedly joining words to make new terms – however plausible or implausible, conjurable or elusive the new compounds might be.

Originally made for October Salon, Belgrade, 2010.

About Tim Etchells’ Drawings and Prints
As in his neon and LED pieces, Etchells’ drawings and prints often draw on his broader fascinations as an artist, writer and performance maker, exploring contradictory aspects of language – the speed, clarity and vividness with which it communicates narrative, image and ideas, and at the same time its amazing propensity to create a rich field of uncertainty and ambiguity.