Molly's Tapestry

In 1922, the same year that Ulysses by James Joyce’s was first published, Jan Miller, the young avante-garde writer, proposed an ‘Abstract Art of the 21st Century’ based only on the marks of punctuation. The most recent in a series of artist’s books investigating the dialectic of mark, word and image, Molly’s Tapestry is an encrypted transcription of the final ‘Penelope’ chapter of Ulysses that further explores the new problematic opened up by the young Polish Futurist which elevated marks of punctuation to the level of an aesthetic object. In the liminal space between visual art & literature, it celebrates the Centenary of his poem in Panowa and Joyce’s seminal work. In the midst of the current electronic revolution in global capitalism which has the coding of digital information at its core, it also marks the Bicentenary of Jean-Louis Champollion’s breakthrough in the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs in 1822, later elaborated in Précis du système hiéroglyphique des ancients Égyptiens. Molly’s Tapestry thus suggests that the relation of theory and practice in art is often comparable to that in science. It’s graphic abstraction poses the political question today of how to read and indeed to write punctuation with respect to the structure and earliest origins of writing itself.