Sign for Leaf Falling, poem by David Annwn
- Ingmire’s work bears its critique largely by inference, of course. The artist’s own passions are visual. He is forever testing the means of lettering, the effects of its various available techniques — elasticity and distortion, fragmentation, altered typographies, shifts in placement, formal arrangement, composition, background, color, and so on — and how these influence alphabetic legibility, and further, how they influence a reader/viewer’s reception of meaning. In this sense, Ingmire’s approach to calligraphy as a mode of research, typified by his relationship with Annwn, is especially intriguing: their collaboration, which began in the early 2000s, is based on ekphrasis, a rhetorical device from antiquity, in which one art medium is described by another, thus heightening its affect for viewers or readers. In this case, the poet sends a poem to the calligrapher, who answers it with an image, which is then returned to the poet to become the basis of another poem, and so on, back and forth, a evolutionary process which, from the calligrapher’s perspective, yields a dynamic exchange, provoking the visualization of the written word well beyond the safety of individual style. As a collaborative undertaking, it is at once conversational and deeply personal
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