The film A hook but no fish explores the Lingua Ignota (unknown language) received by the twelfthth-century German mystic Hildegard von Bingen. The film begins at Disibodenberg in Germany, the site of the monastery where the child Von Bingen was given as a tithe and interned. The film moves from Hildegard’s place of internment, where she first began to write, to the desktop of an unknown narrator, to the living room of a flat, to a farmhouse, to scenes of birds swarming and roaming through streets in London and Rotterdam. This vertiginous time-travel is accompanied by a score composed by Aotearoa New Zealand musician Frances Duncan. A hook but no fish speculates whether the Lingua Ignota is a prophetic language for an arid time such as our own, where rivers run dry, mammals no longer exist, and only technology and tools survive, and asks what Von Bingen’s act of renaming things with a green-sampling word might bring about.

Sigil Design (Rothschild’s mynah) is a series of watercolours that use the letters in the name of the Rothschild’s mynah to form a series of abstract watercolours. The Rothschild’s mynah is a bird, endemic to the island of Bali, that is on the brink of extinction due to poaching. This series explores the “Alphabet Effect” which describes the way the medium of the alphabet, which stresses the sense of sight, has shaped the way we collectively understand our environment. By forming letters into abstract designs, the drawings demand a different way of seeing and “reading.” The watercolours are made using Indian yellow tartrazine, a synthetic pigment primarily used as a food colouring combined with saffron and honey, meaning these watercolours could also be explored/read by the sense of taste.

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