breathing space is a personal exploration of the cycles of breathing.
The concept of design for breathing space was born from my desire to return to a time in which I had an active passion for writing, this ironically being in high school when I was pursuing art. My visual arts diary was filled with pieces of writing scrawled in tiny font as my guilty secret. It went on to become a focal point of my final major work in which I experimented with miniature shape writing not unlike that of concrete poetry.
Every aspect of this major work was handmade with only one physical copy in existence. The digital version that exists on this blog is a far cry from the reader's experience with the original work, but serves instead as a monument to its existence given that at any time the physical copy may be destroyed due to its delicateness.
This delicateness adds to the intimacy of the relationship between breathing space and the reader. The tiny size of the writing, in addition to the thinness of the tissue paper forces the reader to be drawn physically closer. So close in fact that one may find themselves literally holding their breath due to movement otherwise caused as the work is suspended on strings.
The strings also illustrate links between the pieces of writing, making one narrative whole, as well as conveying a message if the reader takes the time to unravel it. However, there is no right or wrong reading order as the way one experiences life cannot be judged.
(Screenshot of breathe definition from Mirriam Webster Online Dictionary, linked via image)
