Annie Vought is an American artist that has focused her work on the rescue of the handwritten language. Some of her most impressive pieces are large format handwritten texts that have been transcribed by the artist and gotten the negative space cut out from them with an exakto-knife. The level of complexity of the technique aspect of her work is already outstanding by itself, creating sculpture like pieces that despite their apparent fragility are actually strong structures based on the text.
The content of each text-based structure is in fact a compilation of text messages, e-mails or other kind of digitally produced text- this is the very core of her philosophy. Her aim is to bring back the power of the word written by hand, a costume that has been left behind for the convenience that internet and texting have given us. Penmanship, word choice, and spelling all contribute to possible narratives about who that person is and what they are like. My recreating the letters is an extended concentration on peoples’ inner lives and the ways they express their thoughts through writing.
