The Frozen Sea: the art of lexicography

My year as Artist in Residence at the OED has had many joys. The simplest of these is, when asked where I work, to be able to respond ‘in the Dictionary’. Of course, when I say ‘Dictionary’, I mean a department, whereas my questioner imagines a set of 20 volumes. I mean an ongoing daily process; they think of a printed authority. Suddenly, in this gap, emerges a mental image of me, shrunk like Alice, moving through a world of words. A really enjoyable disjunction, and one at the centre of my approach to creating a visual art work that responds to the OED.

I was fortunate in being offered a show at Firstsite in Colchester at a time when I was nearing the end of my residency. We arranged that I would show the first fruits of my enquiry into the Dictionary, The Frozen Sea. This, like an earlier work, Mount Fear, is a three-dimensional visual map, this time of word connections.

I started to produce word mappings quite soon after arriving in the OED department. Paul Klee, when drawing, would take a line for a walk. I spent time taking words for walks. Choosing a word, I sniffed around it, following cross-references and other hints in the OED. The word group grew and was shaped over time as I added and subtracted semantic and etymological links, arranging and rearranging until a satisfying form evolved.

The Frozen Sea began in the word checkmate. Following semantic and etymological connections took me through the various strands of the meanings of words such as check, exchequer, chess, jeopardy, hazard, and draughts. Having mapped check to a level that satisfied me (about forty terms), I set about the problem of materializing this map. No map can convey every detail to a reader, as the information would be overwhelming. I chose to focus only on the relations between words. To know if and how words relate, their relative ages and etymologies have to be considered. As my map contained semantic links, this too would have to be recognized. I wrote down three rules for describing the word map in three dimensions: semantic = beside, etymological = on top of, word age = volume.

Another aspect of the OED interested me and influenced The Frozen Sea: the daily research that is the OED, the hours spent in pursuit of the kernel of a word, the time taken in pondering how its entry might be constructed. I wanted to create a work that recognized the process behind the impassive face of the printed OED. I was particularly excited to see a photograph of Robert Burchfield in January 1978 after a flood in his St Giles’ office. He is seen continuing to work amidst a chaos of buckets and stepladders and water. The Canute-like nature of the attempt to order and discipline language seemed to float to the surface in the image.

I decided to create a kind of ideal study, with desks and filing cabinets rescued from an OUP skip, a full set of the OED, blackboards and so on. Having gathered my objects, I ranked them by volume and assigned a word from the check word map to each, based on the simple correspondence that the largest volume should represent the term longest in use, the smallest, the word that had been in use for the most fleeting moment. Having assigned objects to words, I arranged them according to my three rules: objects representing words that related semantically were placed beside one another; those with an etymological connection were stacked horizontally. The room became a working study and simultaneously, a grid with X and Y coordinates. A chaotic-seeming study that was in fact carefully ordered. As a mediation between the maps and the furniture, I made collages of the arrangement. All three elements developed together, changes to one prompting rearrangements and adjustments across the others. The title was chosen to suggest a momentary fixing of a flow of particles. The arrangement will give way to another as another word is mapped.

The artist Richard Long maps his journeys through the landscape in stones and sticks; objects to hand. I have mapped my journey through the forest of words in anglepoise lamps and chairs; objects to hand. The recent work Matter and Spirit of Damien Ortega, a Mexican artist, places text and materiality in disjunctive conjunction. Michael Craig-Martin’s 1970s work An Oak Tree looks at the mysterious chemistry of naming and duality of matter and sign. I situate The Frozen Sea in relation to these works.