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Meditation on supporting emptiness
on the work of Miriam Londoño

For Londoño paper is not the traditional support for texts, drawings or something else. The paper, on the contrary, comes to the foreground as an independent presence in itself. Voluminous, whimsical and sensuous.

Moreover, her forms are built up of words written in the air and drawings made in the air, consisting of paper only. This gives the work a remarkable duplicity. The paper has become a independent medium in its own right and leaves its function of support behind to come to the fore of our attention. Subsequently however, it uses this independence to refer back to its function as support, by remaining, above all else, flat and transparent, and by referring to the things it loves to support for us: words and drawings.

The paper works of Londoño are the embodied self consciousness. Our own consciousness has a supportive quality in itself, it is the most subtle of all supports. Only when you are conscious of something, or when something reaches your consciousness, it exists for you and becomes 'real'.

Londoño's method of working is related to meditation on a subject with a strong emotional character. As the attention becomes involved in meditation, it slowly slides from the emotional content to the form or the structure of the consciousness that supports this emotion in the first place. This supportive structure, in its turn, becomes then a semitransparent screen that, as a contemplative state, however tangible it may be, refers to a reality that cannot be expressed in words. The space between the words, between the letters, between the thoughts … as unsupported being.

Londono:”When writing out words in pulp, they spring to life and become moving shapes with the broad range of possibilities plasticity evokes.As the paper dries, texts become impossible to read once more. Here and there fragments of words will emerge, but what ultimately remains is a visual memory of that single, exhilarating moment of communication.

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