Text as Object
Text as material within the exhibition space
For certain bodies of work, Ready moves text off the page into the exhibition space itself, treating it not as caption or supplement, but as material in its own right, printed, painted, folded or projected so that words carry the same physical presence as the images they sit alongside.
I Also Fight Windmills, exhibitions 2024-2025
Alongside the photographs, the writer Sophie Gaudier-Brzeska's own words, and the names given to her, during her lifetime and after, were treated as physical elements of the exhibition space rather than as accompanying text.
At Film Centre Gallery, Gdynia (2024), typed and framed text panels were placed at intervals along the gallery wall, interspersed with the photographs so that reading became part of moving through the room.
At the State Museum of Grudziądz (2024-2025), text became architectural. A collage of the epithets attached to Sophie in her lifetime and afterwards was painted directly onto the gallery wall in a typewriter script, with a photograph hung across it so that image interrupts text rather than sitting beside it. A manuscript of her writing , alongside a small photograph, were framed and placed on the windowsill among the room's own furniture. In a third piece, lines from her writing were printed and attached to the window glass itself, overlaid on the ironwork of the grille, legible only once a candle was lit outside after dark.
Naomi - A Life Line (2025)
The project began with a folded paper note found in the wartime archive of a British soldier who liberated Bergen-Belsen in 1945: a list of addresses through which survivors hoped to reach surviving family. That object became a starting point for the work: folded pieces of paper carrying text are displayed alongside a soil installation which maps the life of the Holocaust survivor, Naomi Warren. This echoes the fragility and privacy of the original note, something meant to be opened, read, and kept close.
