Day 24 – Hackney Knight

Rose to my own challenge to change pens, which was easy because I fell down the rabbit hole of Tom Hackney‘s exhibition Corresponding Squares at the World Chess Hall of Fame. This show is about the chess games of Marcel Duchamp and I was particularly invigorated by Chess Painting No. 88 (Vajda vs. Duchamp, Nice, 1931).

I have a soft spot for monochrome pictures, and white ones in particular. One of my uni projects was about grief and one of the pieces that came out of that was the White Journal, the diary of a mother writing in white ink in a completely white journal. It was about the modern social (un)acceptability of grieving. I did a lot of that piece when I was on the train going in and out of London because I didn’t have a lot of time. I remember once it was a particularly packed rush hour train, in heavy rain. I really needed to get some work done, so I sat on the floor, which was wet and filthy, at people’s (mostly businessmen) feet writing furiously in white, almost like automatic writing. It must have looked completely mad.

But today’s work is just a further “snexperiment”. No message here. Just changing pens and flipping letterforms around.