JR Carpenter is a visual artist and writer living and working in Montréal. She has exhibited in Montréal, Toronto and London, England, and has published works of fiction and critical theory across Canada and in England and Spain. After studying Fibres and Sculpture at Concordia University from 1990 to 1995, she attended a residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts in 1995 where she began to work with the web. Over the past three years she has worked continuously with HTML, exploring the web's ever broadening potential for interactivity, non-linear narrative and the integration of image and text.
The title of this particular piece, (a grammar of signs has replaced a botany of symptoms), comes from Michel Foucault's The Birth of the Clinic, in which he charts a shift in the language and perception of the body in modern medicine.
Hidden beneath the layers of highly magnified and slowly animated images of plant cells are small narrative texts which reveal botanical observations, specifically in relation to color, from the perception of a child. No sooner are the texts are revealed, then they are covered up again, in a continuous process of regeneration constituting the paradox of the elusiveness of any grammar in the face of a relentless botany.
