Paul Elliman: Not really, I was collecting images that show the body communicating as a language of gestures well before I found a way to work directly with typography—or mainly against it. A few years later, after working with the found typography of objects, I started to think about these images in relation to forms of writing.

CSM: You’ve spoken about these images connecting with a gestural language much older than typography or written language…

PE: Also that I find them in contemporary magazines, an image-based media where gestural language also belongs to a more recent technical stage of human communication.

CSM: Gestures mediated just as writing is, sometimes even looking like writing?

PE: Some of the shapes and lines resemble script or alphabetical signs: vertical, diagonal or horizontal limbs; straight, arching or crossed arms, the curve of the back or the neck. But in most cases they seem even more abstract, whether moving or still, even while enacting gender or other socially specific coded gestures or posture.

CSM: And the images show the body communicating via a cultural semiotics of clothing, a further example of language developing under the impact of mass-production?

PE: Yes, but I’m also a body and I’m interested in what the body is or wants. These images try to frame gestural language between a history of mechanical language in relation to the body, something I can’t really trust, and how the body communicates its own sensual mechanisms, which I think I can still believe in.