Palimpsest of voices

Palimpsest of voices explores the fragility and mutability of language by employing making as a collective learning process, beyond words or shared backgrounds.

Through a series of workshops at Glasgow Sculpture Studios, Leontios worked with the extended community of Oakgrove Primary School that included over 130 pupils, families and staff. Together they produced bisque-fired ceramic pieces and invented the characters of a fictional language, following a method that the artist has developed and employed in his practice over the last few years as an indication of his long-term interest in matter and body correlations.

Reflecting on limitations as opportunities for further development and examining potentials of experiencing the project, Palimpsest of voices is presented in perpetual reconfiguration to suggest a mutable instance of online entanglement, referring to the project’s staged evolution. Viewing screens (smart phones, tablets and laptops) are treated as capturing apparatuses of this open-ended movement and light of certain wavelengths.

Palimpsest of voices is accompanied by a commissioned text by Kirsty Hendry, a podcast with Leontios Toumpouris, Kirsty Hendry and Alex Misick, two limited edition screen prints and a review by Andrés Valtierra.

Photos: Nicola McGrath

Conditions #1
2020
Screen print on paper (Fabriano Rosaspina 220gsm)
29 x 40 cm, edition of 40 + 2 AP

Conditions #2
2021
Screen print on paper (Fabriano Rosaspina 220gsm)
29 x 39 cm, edition of 30 + 2AP

Conditions #1 and Conditions #2 include handwritten notes and sketches that were produced during the workshops and draw from processes of digitisation, authorship and reproduction.