Unfathomable Alphabets

Unfathomable Alphabets: Sticks and Stones developed out of an ongoing collaboration with Austrian artist Veronika Hauer, begun in Vienna in 2019, where we first found shared ground in questions of gesture and subconscious social knowledge.

The installation takes its title from the exhibition theme at project8 Ritual Eternal (curated by Sean Lowry and Kim Donaldson) and from the childhood saying sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me — a phrase that collapses body, nature, and language into one gesture. The work sits with that tension: between the human impulse to read meaning into the natural world and the fundamental indifference of things to our systems of understanding.

At the centre of the installation is a hand-stitched textile screen that divides the gallery space. Working on opposite sides of the screen, each artist arranges ceramic forms — sticks and stones, bones — into ephemeral configurations that invoke the logic of an alphabet without resolving into one. Neither performer can see what the other is making. A two-channel video work, Two Channel Alphabet, uses live-streamed and recorded security camera footage to give audiences simultaneous views of both sides — a perspective structurally denied to the performers.

The performance score, devised by Katie Lee, is also activated by invited performers — Arabella Frahn-Starkie, Melanie Irwin, and Luigi Vescio — each bringing their own material to the score.

The project includes a series of related works: ceramic sticks and stones, a hand-stitched textile (Sticks and Stones, with bones drawn by Veronika Hauer), and two artist decks — An Unfathomable Alphabet (letters found in sticks, by Lee) and ABC Bones (cards in bones, by Hauer).