Rosa Westhaus r.westhaus(at)icloud.com
In my work I am interested in testing how to activate (self-written) text and typography outside of a two dimensional (merely visual) realm, influencing or questioning their impact through making words become something to be felt physically. At the center lies the curiosity to explore three-dimensional forms as means to address or complicate reading possibilities. The relationship between words and their carrier and how certain materials literally shape the understanding of a term becomes an investigation that can take place just so as a grammatical exercise could. I often work on the intersection of typography and sculpture to create installations which fuse together research of material and immaterial worth, measuring systems and critique of units and belief systems, as well as feminist linguistics as a possibility to overthrow language.
A Spiral that is a Bookmark that is a Binding that is a Bibliography that is a Paper Clip and A Paper Clip that is a Bookmark that is a Binding that is a Bibliography. Plexiglass, lasercut and silver, engraved by hand.
In Welcome To...Hidden Meaning the reader becomes a walker in between life-size wooden text gates and moving doors, passing through words like a finger on a page going from line to line, comprehending while moving through a riddle-like parcours that is text. Literal keywords can be collected on the way to form a new “woordenschat” held by a keychain. Words on a revolving door become passwords in every sense; passing on meaning while making them pass and passing amongst them. Vynil text paragraphs on the floor make for wayfinding breadcrumbs of words. Text and typography are not only a visual, but become a physical and cognitive experience.
An illustration of Rebecca Solnit‘s The Blue of Distance, from A Field Guide for Getting Lost. Images were created partly using and manipulating textures of own photos and archive material of Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg. Digital print, 38 pages.
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The Snake and the Apple is a visual essay on what might have gone through Eve‘s mind seconds right before she bit into the apple. Laserprint, 36 pages.
This is the Base Coat for my Body Text is a hand reading performance in which a participant is let to question my future through poetry on acrylic nails, asking for defining / designing life or nail advice, and a publication. The project started from a research on the prominent use of monograms found on the store fronts of beauty salons in Antwerp. Resulting in a research magazine on the complications of their original territorial history and how traces of that might still be influencing the luxury and beauty industry today, I was thinking about how bodily territory, and therefore the border of the body’s extremities, could be declared by markation and even extended. Artificial nails as a claimed space and an elongation of the finger tips can be used to actualize a sense of identity and taste, a certain look. Within This is the Base Coat for my Body Text, the aspect of trying to gain control over the uncertainty of life is metaphorically thought of as altering the body through designing it meticulously and therefore influencing how it and ergo its future could be read.
Accessing A Place consists of three components: a mirror cabinet, a 360 degree booklet with a collection of self-written poems, and a sister publication that gathers the texts as seen through the glimpse into the cabinet. What has been mirrored in the cabinet is mirrored to the outside through the booklet. Inkjet print, 12 pages, and plexiglass mirror.
Inspired by the uneven shapes of key combs, my reflexions and textual/visual research that I gathered in this booklet to work towards realizing Welcome to...Hidden Meaning are arranged in a shuffled manner, stacking information and somewhat turning the text columns into keybits themselves. Physically found text material was scanned and infuses variations of typefaces and line spacing into the grid.