Saussure's Kaleidoscope

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 The book also juxtaposes an earlier unpublished sequence of Graphology poems written some years ago that served as the incipient 'form' for the kaleidoscopic drawing-poems series in this book.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.