Lexical Geometry (2021)

September 29–October 31, 2021

Solo Exhibition
Bromfield Gallery
450 Harrison Ave, Boston, MA 02118

Statement

Sarah Hulsey’s work draws on her background in linguistics to explore the structure of language in a visual domain. Her first solo show at Bromfield Gallery presents two new projects that use iteration, sequence, and variation to suggest linguistic forms.

The four prints in “Subject-Object-Verb/Subject-Verb-Object” were printed by Hulsey during a five-week residency in Lake Kawaguchi, Japan focused on mokuhanga, or traditional Japanese woodblock printing. The faceted, reflected shapes in the prints were loosely inspired by the differing structures of the Japanese and English languages: many of the basic phrases of Japanese have a surface word order that is reversed relative to their English counterpart. The variation in inking across the four prints suggests the generative possibilities of the rules of each language.

“Figures of Speech” is a large, framed array of 36 prints investigating the lexicon—a complex repository of all of the words a speaker knows in their language. Unlike a dictionary, the mental lexicon seems to be organized by relationships that words have in common. This project uses repeated and varying shapes, both etched and collaged, to form visual representations of classes of English words. Running alphabetical lists are letterpress printed across the pages in each row, grouped according to the unconsciously known patterns of the lexicon.