Artist's statement. November, 1993. Accompanying solo exhibition, FAMILIARS, in Lab Space, Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. B.C.

The word "familiar" is a term that emerges from the shady realities of the nonverbal, or the unsayable. Its associations slide between benign and malevolent, cosy and sexual, superstition and faith, knowledge and fear, domestic and public, sorrow and joy, the quick and the dead, familiar and other. Its numerous meanings are mediated according to who one is, or is not. In the same way that interpretations of history reflect various perspectives, my process utilizes a variety of technologies to explore visual language. I am interested in representing the unsaid or the unsayable, and impressed by the subtleties and intelligence of advertising. In particular, my work uses the simulated form of popular mass media combined with textile history to reveal the emotive power of both domains. This medieval technology is bound by the grid of warp and weft, just as digital imagery is bound by pixels.

My current work explores the semiotics of a tapestry font. It is informed by my varied training in codes and languages: studying both African Studies (Xhosa, Archaeology), and English Literature (Anglo Saxon, Chaucer), fluency in Afrikaans and Pitman's shorthand, editing an arts magazine, studying medieval tapestry in France and Scotland. My practice reflects art history's "soft under-belly" by addressing the uncertain condition of culturally displaced anti-hero while referencing past and future technologies.

In this exhibition, the wainscoting of text conjures the decoratively enlarged capitals of early manuscripts and utilizes a left-to-right reading format. The wainscoting also carries a secondary narrative, in that it is reminiscent of the marginalia in the Bayeux tapestry, a document dating from the year 1066, which dramatizes William the Conqueror's victory over England. In this project, the woven and digitally scanned capital letters illuminate the content of the story, as was their historical function. The capitals are interspersed with a contemporary text font, Charlemagne bold, which was recently designed by Carol Twombly after 10th Century letterforms.

Familiars draws upon elements that were a sub-text in my previous work. Sentences (1992), a series of six tapestries with verbatim anti-apartheid newspaper text woven into the landscape, Ciphers 1996), a sound work with text reproduced from “The Romance of Canada” (a Grade Four Geography text book), and a commission for Ottawa City Hall (Call for Expressions, 1994) which includes woven text transcribed into six Aboriginal languages, citing the City of Ottawa's mandate to competing architects. More recently, I produced a work entitled Save (2000), which was exhibited in Dust on the Road, curated by Peter White in 2001. Over the course of nine weeks during a residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts, I placed South African newspapers in a reading booth every day and then bound them in hundreds of circles, forming compacted rings the size of steering wheels.

The portraits in Familiars utilize medieval tapestry technology, and include depictions of crying . These depictions are influenced by an even earlier woven Coptic image of a tearful face and extend into a simple, digitally rendered tale of travel, exploration, and quest. The story owes much to Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, in which Sad Felicity, born gullible, travels to TLOR (The Land of Rules), escapes, and finds a reconciled accommodation with her familiars. I have included work from the collection, which has made concrete what is typically experienced in reproduction. William Blake's Canterbury Pilgrims is an original engraving with a journey theme, that, like the wainscoting, reads from left to right and is the stuff of good dreams; in addition, two beautiful familiars have materialized from the Gallery's collection, in the form of actual 13th and 14th Century illuminated manuscripts. Inevitably, we look back and we look forward. The Familiars, possessed by their own obsessions, capricious but constant, may provoke laughter or they may elicit tears, but they invariably occupy the present moment.

- Ann Newdigate