Saussure's Kaleidoscope: Graphology Drawing-Poems

John Kinsella has been working on his series of Graphology Poems for almost thirty years and published the first of these in the mid-1990s. Concerned with issues of orthography handwriting typing modes of discussing and conveying experience and with issues of perception and modes of writing there has also been concurrently mainly in journal-form an accruing catalogue of visual commentary illustration scribbles sketches colour codings and drawing-poems. This book represents work from a recent series of drawing-poems composed in a continuous sweep often interlinked with journal-writing. The book also juxtaposes an earlier unpublished sequence of Graphology poems written some years ago that served as the incipient form for the kaleidoscopic drawing-poems series in this book. Fascinated by kaleidoscopes as a child the poems and poem-drawings swirl fragment rearrange and circulate around each other bringing events onto the page. Deeply concerned with the well-being of the natural environment as well as human rights and justice issues these pieces work as interventions discussions and exchanges between the real world and imagined ones. Resisting the colonising qualities of Western art they investigate the possibilities of working against representative dimensionality and consider the one dimensional two dimensional and undimensional aspects of representation. The attempt is to create an illuminated book influenced by William Blake wherein the poem and drawing are inseparable as forms of written text.