Mark Hislop

My punctuation is my breath 2019 

Art on Paper
Hazelhurst Regional Gallery
21 September-17 November 2019

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Paul Guest Prize
Bendigo Art Gallery
17 October-7 February 2021

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Critics have described Clarice Lispector as a writer who “fills time with thoughts of death, god, hell, nothingness, language, and murder.” I’m there.

Self-identified as an anti-writer, Lispector conceptualised literature as process—an arduous mode of searching rather than resolution. Her work interrogates structures of power and gender, characterised by an attention to subjective interiority.

My punctuation is my breath engages this legacy through drawing. Structured as a twelve-part sequence, the work charts a movement from presence to absence. The recurring image of Lispector at her typewriter becomes increasingly obscured by her own breath, a contradictory gesture that both produces and effaces the drawing.