Tia Madden, 2024, Some Sort of Notation, Courtesy of the artist

Gallery 2

Some Sort of Notation

Tia Madden

Some Sort of Notation takes its name from the journals of Alexander Marshack: an archaeologist who, in 1964, published a study on seemingly random, human-made notches on palaeolithic bones. Adamant that the markings were far from meaningless, he proposed they were complex lunar observations— a proto-writing system. “It is clearly neither art nor decoration,” he’d said, “but some sort of notation.”

This project considers how modern language structures – such as grids, sequences, patterns and repetitions – create illusions of legibility, prompting misrecognitions of language where it mightn’t exist. By affecting how we differentiate between image and text, these structures confuse the transition between looking and reading, opening a space where poetic and erroneous correspondences can occur.

In this exhibition, several hundred oxidised metal ‘fragments’, which have been hand and lasercut by the artist, are arranged in text-like configurations. These fragments assume the role of anomalous artefacts— relics of unknowable origins that are not bound to our current knowledge systems. A series of ballpoint pen drawings, referencing ancient inscriptions, indecipherable codes, and elaborate hoaxes, act as an estranged lexicon that might inform - or destabilise - possible readings of the fragments.

Weaving connections between the ancient artefactual and the science-fictional, the project continues investigations into the gaps and overlaps between drawing and writing. Some Sort of Notation is an invitation not to decipher, but to misread and to uncode: to pull apart, dismantle and unravel the language structures we rely on to resolve feelings of suspicion and duplicity. To draw conclusions, and doubt conclusions; to get lost and disoriented; and to linger in a space where meaning can be glimpsed or sensed, but never fully grasped.