Peter Vance

Lives and works in Oxford, UK

Artist statement

My practice interrogates the abstract foundations of language and by extension, meaning. The works exploit the interaction between a mirror, vibrated with sound, and a laser reflected onto a photographic medium to visualise the audible. By visualising language, presenting it in a way where it is no longer “readable”, the aesthetic component is no longer overshadowed by meaning and a previously overlooked aspect of reality is brought to the fore. The cause-effect relationship that underpins this process means that, theoretically, it should be possible to reconstruct the sounds that make the forms, from the forms that the sounds have constructed. This direct link between the two iterations of information allows for an exploration not only of the abstract's ability to represent but of the boundary between what we perceive as abstract and what we don't. This is exemplified in the Signifier/Signified series, in which words that have gone out of use in the English Language are the input to the visualisation process. Words that have gone or are going “extinct”, occupy a space where they sound like they belong to the language they are from but could equally not be words at all. Much like hearing a language you don't understand, their form rather than their meaning dominates. This quality, the emphasising of the aesthetic of the word over its meaning, mirrors precisely what the process used to visualise them does. Presented alongside the definition of the word, an equivalence and a...

Artwork