The Asemic Terrain

Remy Dean

‘Snowfields’ (2012) from the series ‘A Beginning to Language’

‘Transcript’ (2015) from the ‘Writing to Escape…’ series

‘160419' (2019) from the series ‘Processionals’

Remy Dean on ‘The Asemic Terrain’

I have this idea that our living landscapes are already poems written in a language of minerals, chemical processes, and ongoing energy exchanges. It is an unfinished epic poem, already spanning billions of years but with a fractal metre of minutes, months, millennia… land stanzas spanning portions of our perceptive interaction through the lens of living.

Our word ‘poem’ proceeds from the French poème, Latin poema, Greek poēma, already an ancient variant of poiēma meaning ‘fiction’, derived from poiein meaning to ‘create’… ergo : Creation is pre- and post-literate Poetry : ad infinitum.

My favourite modes of expression are words, objet-avec-courte-histoire, photography, and drawing. I found it only natural to fuse my photography of natural landscape with other media, veering toward asemic writing, and visual poetry. Finding and forging a way of linking external and internal terrains. More recently, this has evolved into a…