Iris Priest

“...the fear of which one can speak, the one, therefore, that has a signifiable object, is a more belated and more logical product that assumes all earlier alarms of archaic, non-representable fear.” (Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, (1982), Columbia University Press, p. 34)

The 'void' is not nothing. It is a construction, located in language and understood as the absence of something. Etymologically originating from the Latin vocivus (void or absence) and from the French voide (unoccupied, vacant). The definitions epitomises how we need something for their to be nothing, for us to define the parameters of nothing and to give it a signifiable name in order to clothe it in meaning, to access it, to understand it, to posses it. The void is not a table cloth, it is not a hole, an idea or a gesture. It is not the word 'void'. It is the absence of anything. The absence of language, object or thought. The void is essentially unfathomable.

In the lithograph In that beyond four fingers point, in a gesture of immanence, to a single spot on a delicate, William Morris-esque surface. Their gesture is reminiscent of the séance participants in a game of Ouija, but there are no letters on this board. If they are communicating, it is through a lexis of absences. This print came about through a process of working collaboratively with Lee Turner at Hole Editions; learning how to translate the laborious, highly-crafted quality of my practice and certain thematic threads into this new medium. The conversations we had both prior to going into the studio and throughout my time there allowed me a refreshing degree of distance and objectivity on the process and on my practice more generally.