NPO法人J−LAF（ジェイラフ）カリグラフィーを軸とした日本における文字芸術のイベントを開催します。

- BEACH CALLIGRAPHY -

Andrew van der Merwe

WOR(L)DS in general
This calligraphy project, brainchild of stone-carver Maud Bekaert, has a number of components, the most important being the stones, designed by South Africans and carved by Belgians, which were auctioned on 28 September with the proceeds going to Breadline Africa and Sprinkle, for the benefit of children orphaned by the Aids epidemic here. The auction was very successful, raising 61 250 Euro (about 715,000 ZAR / 85,150 USD). Sprinkle, under the leadership of, Chantal de Maeyer, is building a much-needed orphanage in the Drakensberg area, and Breadline has a number of orphanages under its wing. Bev Gillespie, who is a member of both the Cape Friends of Calligraphy and Breadline Africa, has played a pivotal role in organising the event and how the funds are to be distributed. It was she who introduced Maud to some of the orphanages which they are dedicated to helping. Other components of the WOR(L)DS event include exhibitions of work by South African calligraphers at Manna and Symposion, and the beach calligraphy show. The beach calligraphy event was intended to enhance the interest in WOR(L)DS and to help with some of the fund raising.

This is a personal report on my beach calligraphy in general and how this, my first major event, worked out.
The stone auction on YouTube（YouTube）
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxr9RkVRJJA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wn5VfmjCYQw

Beach calligraphy back ground

I am a professional calligrapher and have freelanced in Cape Town, South Africa for about 15 years. (for more background info seehttp://www.writtenword.co.za/home_about.htm ) I also surf, and doodling on the beach has always been an enjoyable outlet for me. Scratching in the sand with a stick, however, has proved less than satisfactory because it makes more of a mess than a mark. This has led me, over the past seven years, to develop various instruments which mark the sand in less messy ways, and ultimately to a kind of scoop which leaves neat V-cut letters of the sort one gets in stone carving.

My casual doodling on the beach received a boost in 2004 when a workshop I held for the Cape Friends of Calligraphy was covered by a major local newspaper as well as national television. It was received with great curiosity and enthusiasm. After that, I started taking my beach calligraphy more seriously and began developing new instruments.
The next boost came in 2005 when Maud Bekaert, a Belgian stone carver, who was visiting South Africa on holiday, looked me up via the internet. I showed her around the Cape Peninsula and we stopped at a beach to do some beach calligraphy. She was so taken with it that she began thinking about having me come to Belgium and perform there. At this stage I was still photographing my work with my cell phone camera!

Zeebrugge

In August 2006 I was invited to Brugge for two days to meet the people of Brugge Plus, the marketing organisation of Brugge, as well as other people important to the cultural organisation of the city. I prepared a demonstration on the beach, which resulted in the green light for the beach calligraphy event. Apparently, no-one had seen anything like it before.
Thanks to Maud’s hard work, a lot happened in the next two years, and I arrived there again in July 2008, ready to spend the whole month writing on the beach. The beach part of the WOR(L)DS event was launched by Patrick Moenaert, the Mayor of Brugge, at a small function in a marquee on the beach , after which the whole party of about 50 people, walked down to see the work I had begun, only to find that it had been washed away by the high tide! I then had to demonstrate for the media and everyone in the awful, mushy, shelly sand that was left! Somehow, much to my surprise, they remained pleased (even after I got mud on the mayor’s shoes!), but for me this difficulty was to set the tone for the first half of my time there. I could not work to my own standard, and struggled to enough work for display, but people remained enthusiastic.
sp0810_14.jpgsp0810_15.jpg


I think we can safely say that it was a world first, but as such there were some serious difficulties. When I arrived on the beach to begin work, I was faced with a huge, 30 x 300m, specially demarcated area, almost none of which contained sand I could work in! It was dry, full of shells and had been driven all over by the construction vehicles which had placed the shipping containers for offices and a viewing platform, which, it turned out, had been placed below the spring high water mark. The only areas I could work in were far down, below the high water mark, where the work would be washed away every day. On top of this, the weather which followed was very bad. It rained constantly and often the wind blew so hard that my work was blown away before I could finish it!
I worked extremely hard and began to feel depressed and miss my family! One thing that saved my sanity in that difficult time was learning an old Flemish word for the temporary nature of things: “vergankelijkeid.” It became my motto. I wrote “vergankelijkeid – onvergetelijkeid” around a small beach flower (onvergetelijkeid = unforgettable).
The wind did however, blow in some dunes of nice fine sand around the containers at the entrance and once we had rigged up a water supply, I was able to wet these dunes and do some good work in them.

I spent about half my time on the beach carving a very enjoyable poem about the sea, written specially for the event by David van Reybrouck, one of Belgium’s best known poets. This work, I did in the most prominent places near the entrance, and when the weather finally improved, in the last two weeks, it lasted for up to three days.
The other half of my time was spent carving names for individuals and sponsors of the event, the proceeds of which went to Sprinkle and Breadline. I carved nearly 300 names and other requests! I did this work below the high water mark. Then I spent most of my evenings and early mornings processing the photographs.
Belgians are witty and fun-loving and I had a very good time relating to the small crowds that gathered around to watch and have their photos taken with their names in the sand. I got some good photographs, and I have to say, that this, in addition to being able to drink the remarkable Belgian beer, was the most enjoyable part of the experience for me.

Where to from here?

For me, this event has been a lifeline. Trying to make a career as a professional calligrapher in South Africa has been very difficult and there have been many times which I have considered giving up. This event has encouraged me, and thanks to the sponsorship of Brugge Plus, I was paid well enough to be able to set aside my bread-and-butter work long enough to go to Belgium, and to spend time developing my beach calligraphy skills to a new level. I have also been able to buy some of the photography equipment I need.
My short term vision for the beach calligraphy is to begin printing and selling greeting cards, to construct a web site at www.beachcalligraphy.com and to offer workshops to interested calligraphy societies around the world so I can begin sharing my discoveries. I am exploring ways to mass produce my instruments. I have also begun teaching some of the refugees who were drawn to calligraphy through the WOR(L)DS project.

The impact of WOR(L)DS on local calligraphy

I have spoken here mainly about my beach calligraphy, which may be interesting to calligraphers, but is nothing compared with the stories to be told of the lives of the many, many Southern African children orphaned by Aids. For their sake, I am sure we would do this again if the opportunity arose, but there is another important thing that needs to be said about WOR(L)DS: this project has been the catalyst that South African calligraphy needed to begin finding its own voice, its own style. It has also broadened us socially, something we desperately need in a country whose success depends on creating harmony between a huge variety of people who, because of the practice of Apartheid, were at the brink of war with each other. The practice of calligraphy here has previously been dominated by a few, relatively privileged whites, but through WOR(L)DS, we have drawn in people from very different "worlds" - even Zimbabwean and Congolese refugees, thus beginning a new and exciting era for calligraphy in South Africa. This interaction is empowering for the newcomers and gives all our work deeper meaning and vitality.
Calligraphy in South Africa is still very small-time and none of this would have been possible without the wonderful, generous, hard-working, warm, friendly and wise partnership of the calligraphers of Belgium - Maud Bekaert, in particular - and the City of Brugge which threw its weight wholeheartedly behind WOR(L)DS. We will always be grateful and value this friendship.

Links

The Beach Calligraphy display was a minor part of the WOR(L)DS project and it certainly could never have been as spectacular as the sand sculpture displays that are so well known in Belgium, but the media attention it attracted was surprising. It was covered by local television and local and national newspaper: Here are a few links, including one page with a video insert:

http://www.standaard.be/Artikel/Detail.aspx?artikelId=4P1TSDDJ

http://www.knack.be/weekend/nl/news/articles/a8740-article.jsp

http://www.focustv.be/articles/index.jsp?articleID=35219§ionID=188&siteID=33

http://picasaweb.google.com/Scriptores.Redactie/ZandkalligrafieEls?authkey=P3CHFSYkIXA

One last thing

A catalogue of the WOR(L)DS work has been made possible by extensive sponsorships gathered through the hard work of Maud Bekaert. Beautifully designed by one of the main sponsors, Hilde Wintein of OuVert (who also generously accommodated me for the duration of my stay), it is being sold with all the proceeds going to Sprinkle and Breadline. To buy a copy, contact Chantal at chantal@sprinkle.be.

Emiko Okayama
Macquarie University, Sydney Australia

When Lafcadio Hearn first stepped into a Japanese city some 120 years ago, he was quick to express his surprise at the array of banners and shop signs. He observed the peculiarity of the writing, describing the characters as pieces of pictures with life (Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, 1894: 18-20). Given the pictographic foundation of Japanese writing, it should not come as a surprise that words and pictures have enjoyed substantial equality in Japan, and been used interchangeably across many forms of literature and art – from The Tale of Genji scrolls to Edo picture stories and prints, and in calligraphy. These traditions are alive and well in contemporary Japanese graphic design. I believe this is because writing and pictures are much closer in Japan than in cultures with alphabet writing. It is a condition that has been neglected by scholars, since the dominant views on scripts have come from alphabet users, who see words and pictures as fundamentally different. In the West, the highly abstract, phonetic and single-directional nature of alphabet script has encouraged a separation of words and pictures, and a word-controlled linear presentation of information. But with Japanese, there are multiple choices – of script, characters, script direction, page layout, etc: many characters have a pictographic or ideographic dimension.

As a consequence artists have been far more inclined to incorporate writing in pictures, and writers more inclined to think visually about their texts.


Good examples are Tsukudajima Sumiyoshi matsuri (Ando Hiroshige, 1858) and Taira no tatemaii (Unknown artist, 1855). In both pictures writing is the focus of the picture: a banner in the former indicates the place and event and in the latter the kanji character, taira (peace), is the centre of attraction. In literature, Japanese novelists, writing with strongly graphic kanji and contrasting phonetic kana, are more conscious of visual effects, and express their messages through both textual and visual means. Tanizaki Junichiro’s original novels are such examples: in these he carefully organises scripts, page layout and illustrations to convey particular visual messages. His Kagi (The Key, 1956) consists of two alternating diaries: the husband’s is written with kanji and angular katakana, and the wife’s with kanji and curvaceous hiragana – masculine and feminine respectively. More recent writers are equally adept in their graphic expression. Kyogoku Natsuhiko uses graphic software, InDesign, for his writing template and every single page of his books always ends with a period. Onda Riku’s mystery novel, Eugenia (2005), has pages of different sizes and alternating column widths to add an element of unease to the readers’ experience.

Another example is calligraphy, which sits somewhere between art and writing, and normally considered to be a craft in the West. However, in Japan calligraphy is highly regarded as an art form and commonly housed in art galleries alongside paintings. In Japanese calligraphy, paper, tone of the ink, strokes, shapes of lines and space between scripts are as important as the writing. The meaning (message) of a calligraphic work is conveyed through all these means. Nishikawa Yasushi’s Toro (1976) consists of two characters, which means ‘praying mantis’. In this work, his son, Nishikawa Kyotaro, has explained to me how his father tried to express visually the mantis’s aggressive side when confronted with enemies.
This is the background to my research, from which it is evident that the nature of Japanese script brings with it a set of underpinning ideas that offer far greater graphic versatility than does the alphabet. They can be readily read in any direction. Go into any Japanese library or bookshop, and one will find publications with texts written at least in three directions. Pictures can easily substitute for characters or parts thereof. Over the last six months, I have been exploring this theme in my project, Text-Image Relationships in Art, Literature and E-media in Japan, as a visiting research fellow at the Graduate School of International Development, Nagoya University. My visit was made possible by a Japan Foundation Fellowship 2007-2008. My research suggests that the characteristics of a writing system influence a person’s thinking in all forms of visual and spatial expression. Further, it suggests that because of the picto/ideographic content in Japanese scripts, it may be more useful to think of a script-picture continuum in Japan than the two as separate.

Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of my work is that which suggests how the nature of the script and associated graphic traditions are giving the Japanese a creative edge in today’s world of e-media, where there are so many ‘new’ opportunities for script-picture combinations to continue ‘old’ cultural practices. My work draws attention to web pages and text messages: reflecting upon contrasting English and Japanese approaches and practices when using words and pictures on websites and in email messages. It highlights the text-driven nature of English websites where images are more often separate from and subordinate to texts, and pages designed to be ‘read’. Japanese counterparts show a higher text-image integration, and actively exploit a variety of computer techniques such as overlaps, layering, pictures within pictures, and wallpaper backgrounds: here, it is less a matter of ‘reading’ and more of ‘navigation’. In the early versions of text-only e-mail environment, the use of images was restricted. Alphabet users were reluctant to move from a conventional writing style with limited visual expression – perhaps multiple exclamation or question marks but little more. Japanese message-makers were quick to express themselves visually in spite of the dearth of symbols: for instance, punctuation marks, and geometric shapes were used to create frames (✩ﾟ･*:.｡:　:｡.:*･ﾟ✩), and emoticons were invented (^_^) (>_<). Such techniques have since been absorbed into text messaging by Western youth. Now the technologies have much improved and combining texts and images has become much easier and Japanese are taking full advantages of these. This is demonstrated by the popularity of mobile novels and mobile comics, which are fast becoming bigger sellers than conventional publications in Japan.

*Note: This is an edited version of my report published in Omusubi, the Japan Foundation Sydney newsletter, in July 2008.

Dr. Okayama
Dr. Okayama is a lecturer in the Department of Asian Studies (International Studies from 2009) at Macquarie University where she teaches Japanese language and culture. She is also a NAATI accredited translator and holds a Masters degree in Translation Studies from Dublin City University. Her doctoral thesis at Sydney University was an historical investigation of Japanese third person pronouns covering three centuries, and her main interests lie in translation studies, language change and Japanese visual culture.

The Stone Walk:

The Process in South Africa.

In South Africa the first part of the process was to bring people interested in words and letters together in a week-long workshop to develop new and interesting scripts that reflected the continent. Maud Bekaert came over with over 30 “word-fragments” from Belgian and South African poets and songwriters. Over 30 people from various places in Southern Africa and from the refugee community in Cape Town worked with each other for a week.

This required skillful teachers and facilitators who were there to challenge, inform and encourage each person’s unique letters and how they interacted with the poetry or song fragment each was given to design. So, for example, Mak1one, a local graffiti artists took us through the first day of the workshop and let us loose with tagging and bombing using the instrument of the spray can, to make marks and letters. Andrew van der Merwe, gave us sticks and ink and helped us look at some of the scripts from the central and northern part of Africa. Heleen de Haas, brought us all back to the page and design, through making us dance together so we could understand how letters need to not only talk to each other but dance across paper. In between Maud had to advise from the point of how the designs would look carved in stone.

By the last day of the workshop, Maud had over 40 designs: very unique and different which she then took back to Brugge (her home town, and one of the main sponsors of Wor(l)ds). Once Maud took the layouts of the designs back with her, the South Africans could only wait and imagine what would happen: whose designs would be chosen and how would they look in stone. However other initiatives were bubbling in South Africa as a result of this working together. But more of that later.

The process in Belgium

Thereafter it was over to the Belgian artists. Stone had been donated as well as a place for the carvers to work in: in Damme. The best designs were chosen and then for 14 months the carvers worked on their stones which you can now see displayed on the stone path. These stones will be auctioned at the end of September for orphans and vulnerable children. They worked in a disused school in Damme which one can also see on the Walk.

Special effort was put into the placing of the stones. For example the stone which carries the words” We spreiden onze vingers uit. We dragen de aarde op handen”: “We spread out our fingers. We take a hand in the earth” was placed in Damme the hometown of the poet “Frederik Lucien De Laere. One has to note that stones were sponsored by various individuals and organizations and all the carvers donated their time to carving the stones: some carving more than one stone: true generosity of spirit.

The Opening of Wor(l)ds and the Stone Walk

NKOSI SIKELEL’ AFRIKA!
GOD BLESS AFRICA!
These are the words which now greet all the visitors to the information centre in the lovely city of Bruges. They were carved into a huge piece of stone by Belgian carver Christophe Annys in a design by a South African artist and calligrapher (now UK resident) Lin Kerr. The opening of Wor(l)ds took place on the evening of the 9th June at the Concert Building in Bruges where the stone was unveiled by Ms Mantsaye Ngwaila, the head of Tourism and Culture at the South African Embassy.

The opening ceremony, inside the beautiful Conzertgebou, was hosted by the mayor of Bruges, Mr. Patrick Moenaert, and attended by many artists and dignitaries, who packed the venue. Five of the artists from South Africa were also there. The excitement of the occasion was doubled by the presentation of the catalogue of Wor(l)ds by Maud Bekaert, the creator and energy behind the whole project. The catalogue of 195 pages details the incredible journey of the words, stones and people. The photographs are beautiful and it is on sale for Euro 20. The catalogue was also an act of love and generosity as it was sponsored and all labour was donated. The proceeds of sales go towards vulnerable children.

Walking the walk.

Walking the Stone Route one notices that the stones are very special and very different. They are different is size and in character. And of course different in design. They reflect the artists and the meaning and a lot of thought was put into placing them in the four towns.

One thinks of the stone: “Laat die Hemel Vrij”: “Set the Heavens Free”, designed by Ley Makalele. Carved into a blueish stone, by Luc Baeye, it seems to reflect the heavens as well as freedom. And knowing that Ley had to flee for his life from the Congo, and also his deep spirituality, it conveys so much more to one.

Sue William’s design of Frank Pollet’s words “Ik wil een nieuwe stad ontwerpen in de aderende kleuren van het hart”: “I want to design a new town in the veined colour of the heart” carved by Els Vanthournout combines the feeling of looking at the contours of a city with the warmth of the stone.

Bart Vonck’s words “Nooit is Een Kooi” – “Never is a Cage” and Eric Mawethu’s solid design reminds us that thinking in terms of “never” imprisons us just as interpreted in the carving of Luc Baeye.

Lin Kerr’s stone “Nkosi Sikelel' Afrika” as the start of the Stone Path reminds one that Africa chases a deep groove in your heart and then runs through your veins, even if one lives in Europe. Lin flew from the U.K. to Cape Town to be with all of us for the week in which we all designed the poetry fragments. Unnoticed and quietly she not only concentrated on her designs but offered support and encouragement to the younger, newer designers from the townships.
All 40 stones are along a path which one can walk or cycle along, taking time to enjoy the beauty of the stones, the meaning of the words and also the poetry of the surroundings.

Bev Gillespie
Biography
Bev Gillespie works and lives. She was born in Johannesburg but migrated to Cape Town in her 30s where she studied at the University of Cape Town. Most of her work has been in the "not for profit" sector and she is currently working part-time for Breadline Africa (www.breadlineafrica.org.za), one of the beneficiaries of Wor(l)ds. Her interest in calligraphy stems from a course given by Hilary Adams. Later teachers included Lin Kerr and Heleen de Haas.