Richard Godbold MFA Visual Studies Thesis 2016
Godbolderdash and Godboldygook
My intent with Godbolderdash and Godboldygook is to create a wall-based installation which utilizes formal, aesthetic qualities to suggest a type of consideration of the hierarchy of sensorial information that I perceive in life. This is to say that I hope to create a form that reflects my own personal, genuine bafflement of the world around me. This bafflement is rooted in linguistic and pictorial forms, as well as the seemingly innate and socially-constructed cognitive processes which govern the awareness, comprehension and valuing of these forms. Godbolderdash and Godboldygook is a chance for me to communicate what is familiar and unfamiliar to me, while using both a phonetic and visual language that is as much my own as it is learned.
What is it to speak of the angle which surrounds the parenthesis? What does it mean to make a word yellow, while it descends into negative space? How can geometry exist with thoughts of lunch time? Is this line more important than this word? Can infinity exist in my corner? What makes rhetoric into gibberish? Is it the words themselves, or the comprehension or lack thereof of the words themselves? Can the answer to that be drawn? How can language cover a page or sphere? What happens when a thought meets a rhombus? What is it to divide a circle into thirds on top of a piece of metal? How malleable can all things be? These are just some of the questions I hope to squish together in a sideways comma with other thoughts and shapes in Godbolderdash and Godboldygook.