scanlon&grivell 

flags

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A Christmas holiday displacement activity involving the teaching and acquisition of the craft skill of knitting, this work resulted in the creation of a negative (white text on black background) ampersand in the format of an emblematic flag. Whilst acquiring the skill Paul temporarily lost the capacity for speech.

 

The work was created in response to a gallery brief to design and manifest a flag. The outcome was shown alongside 40 other artists’ responses. Our favourite was a shed door flag.

 

Far too heavy to ever fly, the knitted ampersand flag now serves as a drape, to hide the shame of our over-sized ugly telly.

 

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Am Nuden Da Gallery

Session 2 - Flags Exhibition

London, 2009

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[The origin of the ampersand can be traced back to the Latin word 'et', meaning 'and'. The E and the T that make up this word were occasionally written together to form a ligature - a character consisting of two or more joined letters. The word ampersand is a corruption of the phrase "and per se & (and)", meaning "and by itself and represented by the symbol &". Traditionally, when reciting the alphabet in English-speaking schools, any letter that could also be used as a word in itself ("A", "I", and, at one point, ”O") was repeated with the Latin expression per se ("by itself"), with the symbol ‘&’ included at the end of the alphabet recital.

For these reasons we adopted the symbol as something of a motif in our collaborative work as Scanlon&Grivell (no spaces). In particular it has come to signal an inclusive ethos – ‘&’ rather than ‘either/or’.]

 

 

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